The Televisionary Oracle (41 page)

On the big-screen TV, a beatific Eleanor Roosevelt is now sitting on a dragon-headed golden throne holding a phallic wand and sporting a new halo as big as a hula hoop. She’s bestowing sloppy mouth kisses on a long receiving line of famous men from history, including Socrates, Charlemagne, various Popes, Napoleon, Teddy Roosevelt, Stalin, Nixon, Rush Limbaugh, Joseph McCarthy, and Howard Stern.

The band is hot tonight. No broken strings interrupt the flow, no extended tuning of guitars forces me to do shtick while waiting to return to the scheduled program. The moment “I Dropped Out of Kindergarten” is over, “The Triple Witching Hour” begins. As I light the thick green candle on top of the TV altar and pull out my wad of five-dollar bills, Amy and Darby croon the intro:

Audience members who’ve attended recent shows know this is their cue to purify their money karma. Quickly there’s a gaggle of volunteers holding up their legal tender for me to dispatch. I sing the verse:

After another chorus and verse, the volume of the instruments drops way down as Darby and I do a call and response.

“Do you love money?” she sings. “Yes I do, yes I do,” I reply, “by the light of the silvery moon.” And then:

Some of the bills I torch are my own. Some are those handed me by the amateur performance artists in the audience. As I gaze out at the faces beyond the flames, I sense in many of them a fascinated repulsion and flabbergasted awe, as if I were incinerating an American flag and spitting on a crucifix at the same time. Others scream encouragement, egging me on as if I were conducting an exorcism.

Maybe seventy dollars have been turned to ash when there’s an unscripted arrival. A tall woman has leaped up onto the stage. She’s wearing a rainbow tweed jacket, unbuttoned to reveal a marigold bustier. Her lower half sports a semi-transparent chiffon wraparound skirt that reveals below it tight-fitting azure boxers with a pink camellia pinned at the crotch. Around her neck is a flask attached to a leather necklace.

It’s Rapunzel, followed by a woman I don’t recognize.

They stride right up to me, and I let a half-burned ten-dollar bill in my hand fall into a large bowl full of dirt on the altar. Our two roadies look at me apprehensively from the wings of the stage, wondering if they should intervene, but I wave them off. This is one interruption I’m going to try to integrate into the show.

Before I can figure out what they’re up to, the strange woman kneels down on all fours behind me, and Rapunzel pushes me. I topple. Towering over me where I lie, she bellows gleefully, “The archetypes are mutating, Rockstar. See if you can turn
this
into fuel.”

She squats down, pries my lips open with strong hands, and drops a thick gob of saliva into my mouth. I swallow it whole. She lingers,
massaging the bones next to my eyes with a softly electrifying jiggle.

The spit and the jiggle have the strangest effect on me. My perceptual field shifts with a slide and a crackle, as if an angelic chiropractor had just manipulated my brain into perceiving a hyperdimension next door to the realm I usually inhabit. A crush of alien images cascades into my mind’s eye—crocodiles dancing on their hind legs, a spinning weathervane surmounted by a vulture, not a valentine heart but the anatomically correct organ ejaculating half-liquid pearls from its aorta, sea anemones spiraling out of the horns of bull skulls. These scenes coexist with my view of the Catalyst stage, which itself is half-dissolving into a rippling gossamer curtain of liquid sparks.

Struggling to become accustomed to my new domain, I recall the technique of the whirling ballet dancer: To keep from getting dizzy, she compels her gaze to alight on the same fixed point during each rotation. The sight I choose as my focus is Rapunzel’s beatific yet cracked grin, one side of her mouth raised higher than the other. Though the rest of her is at first distorted by my vertigo, gradually I can make out an impossible fact: She’s removing her clothes.

“Thunderbolt,” I hear her say (to me?), “let’s go swimming.”

“Namaste,” I hear myself answer. “I greet the Goddess within you.”

Then a further marvel unfolds, a miracle as shattering as if the Virgin Mary were descending from the ramp of a silver space ship with writhing purple snakes for hair and a wet t-shirt emblazoned with a bleeding rose. As I lie on the stage floor, Rapunzel pulls off my furry Pan pants, revealing my body to be fully primed for worship.

“You’re just going to dive in cold turkey?” I hear myself asking her.

“Not really, dearest. I’ve been wading around you for centuries.”

The next moment is impossible. My beloved, the Queen of the Menstrual Temple herself, lowers herself down onto my shouting cobra. I’m incredulous at how wet and ready she is. Instantaneously she’s grooving on top of me with the improvisational playfulness of a dancer.

I flash on how voracious women are portrayed in porn movies and Islamic doctrine and Christian fantasies: as leering and menacing, oozing with twisted love. I shudder to think of all the clitoridectomies that have been inflicted in the sick name of reining in the libidinous urges of the descendants of Eve. A spontaneous prayer flies from my lips.
“O Goddess, thank you thank you thank you forever for the uninhibited joy and eagerness I feel in the presence of Rapunzel’s uninhibited hunger. Thank you thank you thank you for scouring away from my body every last shred of the patriarchal fear of divine female ecstasy.”

There’s a time for love-making in which each partner is as concerned with the other’s pleasure as with her own. There’s a time in which the ebb and flow of desire from partner to partner follows a sweet, intuitive rhythm. This is not one of those times. My pleasure—I surrender to it with utter peace—consists wholly in reading the spiral of Rapunzel’s drive towards delirious bliss. I want nothing more than to telempathically anticipate, beyond thought, the precise angle she wants to feel my lingam against her yoni, the exact spot she needs to be touched on her ass or back or ankles that will sluice the flow of kundalini to the source of her liberation. Does she want me to stay rock steady while she corkscrews and stretches and shimmies? Does she want me to lose control of my hips and pump her like a fibrillating heart?

Her dance atop me betrays no habits of movement. No sequence of squirms, shudders, and rotations is ever repeated. She’s the best kind of prodigiously original artist—no contrivance, no self-consciousness. Hers is the deep orgiastic intelligence of nature eternally reinventing itself.

She leans down to blend her ancient mouth with mine, her primordial tongue. Tears that taste like seawater trickle down onto my face from her Neolithic eyes, triggering a reflexive gush of tears from me. I feel the soft prongs of her nipples massaging my chest, and become aware that she wants me to lift my knees so they’re clutching her hips. She responds with a flurry of pelvic whirlpools, ratcheting my lingam back and forth from her cervix to her G-spot.

Sweat as thick as pear juice drips down from her neck and makes me glad. I can’t stop drinking in the confounding sight of her acute jet pilot eyes drenched with what?—demonic compassion? savage vulnerability? How can anyone be so tender and so relentless at the same time? Many times I whisper, “My … body … is … yours.” As if in acknowledgement, Rapunzel performs the pompoir, rhythmically squeezing my jade stalk with her circumvaginal muscles.

Though I’ve been privileged with this tantric trick before, I’ve never experienced mastery like this. Her soaking, rippling, thousand-fold grip oscillates from delicate to firm, from a glissando shimmer to a furious suck, in an impeccably orchestrated rhythm. Warrior vulva. Shaman yoni. Gorgeous cunt that’s fully awakened, relentless, and trained in militant playfulness.

Something like an orgasm begins to announce itself at the back of my head. Hers? Or mine? Or both together? My brain is a sky in which sexually excited particles of honey amber and iced rubies are gathering into storm clouds. My eyes are thick swarms of yellowjackets funneling into the heart of the pregnant thunder. Suddenly my legs spring out straight and taut, and every bone in my body stretches as if straining to outgrow itself. For a long time—ten minutes?—I am coiled stiff on the verge of a rapturous electrocution. And then I feel the spurt of lightning slam out of that sweet spot in the back of my head, wrap itself like hot oil around my spine, and plummet headfirst into the spongy gel of my scrotum. Instantaneously it swims a million tight spirals then spasms back up my spine like an eel on fire, burying itself in the nest at the back of my brain.

As if on cue, Daniel and George slip into a celebratory dirge, their dark and spangled flourishes pouring through drummer Squint’s glistening fountain of cymbals as if to suggest the soul’s journey after the death of the body.

Then, as Rapunzel and I trade a secret look utterly free of self-consciousness, and as Amy’s flute gently pries open the top of every head in the room, there is for a moment the birth of a new emotion, alien to history yet communal property. No words exist for it in any modern language, though a delicious glimpse of its name emerges from the blend of “compassion” and “lust.” It half-materializes, like an angel straining to burst through the dimensional veil.

O
nce upon a time. How it all began. The very first trickster, before all other tricksters, was a menstruator. Lilith to be exact. Adam’s first wife, long before the docile Eve came along to take the fall. Lilith the Free. Lilith the Brave. Lilith the Master Purveyor of Holy Fun and Sacred Play.

The Moslems and Jews reviled her. “She doesn’t come when we whistle for her,” they whined. “She calls everything by its wrong name. Says our grave prayers are nothing more than smarmy flattery. For God’s sake, she even uses our foreskins as jewelry.”

The Christians were equally afright. “Succubus,” they dubbed her. Monks were schooled to sleep with their hands crossed over their genitals, clutching a crucifix. “Every time a pious Christian suffers a wet dream,” the old boys used to moan, “Lilith laughs.”

Lilith! Let us sing her praises with chortling snorts. Let us celebrate her legacy with razzing guffaws. Lilith the Annihilator of Mediocre Desires! Lilith the Nourishing Source of Lovable Chaos! Lilith the Noble Asshole, scaring the shit out of all the mirthless ass-souls!

Lilith: the original woman who loved too much.

“Let me get on top,” she badgered Adam. “You’re missing my G-spot. You’re boring me to tears.”

But Adam was immune. Adam was outraged. “Missionary position or nothing,” he bargained. “Cursed be the man who makes the woman heaven and himself earth.”

“Plow me while I’m bleeding,” she bitched back, giggling. “Lick me while I whistle.”

“No way,” spewed Adam. “You don’t make the rules around here.” (Dude didn’t know what the ancient tantrics knew: that boinking a menstruator was like taking a genius drug.)

“Most of all,” she dissed him with melodious snickers, “you hate my chuckle fucks; begrudge the way my orgasms and bellylaughs get all fluxed together.”

That did it. He’d fix her. He wouldn’t get it up. Couldn’t get it up. “Get out,” he decreed. “You embarrass me.” Turning his gaze skyward, he croaked, “Dad!” and Jehovah thundered back in support, “Screech-Demon, begone!”

“Wha’ the?!” Lilith mused. “Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke.”

And so she split for cozy exile, shacking up with a horny crew of endearing robin hoods far from the scorch and belch of history. And the rest is herstory.