The Televisionary Oracle (61 page)

But Jumbler’s gifts go beyond even all these wonders. As Madame Blavatsky prophesied on the First Day of Creation, Jumbler’s “The
Eater of Cruelty” has been the “father” of my revisioned mystery school, just as the Pomegranate Grail is the mother. Jumbler has been my collaborator. We’ve extensively explored the Drivetime through the power of our tantric meditations; we’ve stalked revelation there, gathering raw materials to use in building the new covenant; back in the Waketime, we’ve exhaustively discussed the meaning of our visions and put in motion the plans to translate them into material reality.

I’ll list just a few examples. The idea that the sacred could and should be playful: It originated with Jumbler but came natural to me, and I helped take it places Jumbler couldn’t imagine by herself. The theory that menstruation is a central metaphor for an understanding of death that could save the world from extinction: It was implicit in the teachings of the Pomegranate Grail, but I couldn’t have brought it to fruition without having my brainpower supercharged by Jumbler’s brilliant, sensual devotion. The notion that spiritual women should find a way to aggressively celebrate sex, thereby seizing the authority to redefine its cultural expression: the Menstrual Temple’s strategy for doing this grew directly out of my response to Jumbler’s tantric mastery.

It’s no surprise, then, that a part of me feels desolate, even a little guilty, as I contemplate the hurt I must unleash on my beautiful companion. But most of me is completely united with my fate. From the time its contours were first revealed during the First Seven Days of Creation, there has never been a single contradictory omen to call it into question. Jumbler herself, the one person with most to lose, has steadfastly counseled me to carry out the mandate.

Beginning tonight, I am linked to the whole world with the same intimate connection I’ve previously shared only with Jumbler. It may be a poetic exaggeration to say that from this day forward I am officially the Global Love Slave; nonetheless, there is a huge grain of truth in that title.

Even more problematical for Jumbler, tonight will bring my first literal sexual encounter with a human being other than her. As Madame Blavatsky put it on Day One of the First Seven Days of Creation, I will begin “administering the tantric yoni juju directly to one of the elite contagious agents among the beloved enemy.” I will set the healing infection in motion.

The funeral parade has been continuing to proceed slowly up Pacific Avenue. I gaze back to take in the spectacle. On the float directly behind us, Sibyl, the oldest member of the Menstrual Temple, is filling a large iron cauldron with paper and objects that she is gathering from people along the route.

“Give me a written statement or symbol of your most heart-rending anguish,” she’s saying over her microphone, “and I will conduct a ritual of purification during which I will burn that statement or symbol to ash as I pray for your deliverance. This may not extinguish your pain completely, but it will conjure a healing that you will be able to feel the benefits of within days. Guaranteed by the Televisionary Oracle!”

Behind Sibyl is our one and only Cadillac convertible. Three of the Menstrual Temple’s beefiest babes, Tara, Wendy, and Alana, are sitting on the back of the car wearing, aptly enough, bikinis made from round slabs of baloney sewn carefully together by our excellent seamstress Dagmar. Given the fact that each of them tips the scales at over two hundred twenty, a lot of lunchmeat has been sacrificed.

The three bathing beauties are handing out party favors to the crowd, among which are “Owl Pellet Dissection Kits” (includes actual owl pellets, plastic forceps, magnifying glass, and bone sorting chart) and bumperstickers that read “Daily Dream Work Prevents Genocide of the Imagination” and “Own Your Shadow Or It Will Own You.” Every now and then they’re also sneaking in a select few “Unconditional Love Certificates.” These precious documents assure their owners that the Menstrual Temple’s Prayer Warriors will conjure a flurry of fierce petitions to the Goddess Herself in their behalf for a given hour in the near future.

Dancing women, faces hidden by skull masks, are weaving around the floats. They’re clothed in black body suits with the image of a skeleton on both the front and back. Over this foundation, they wear red satin merrywidows, silver lace bras and panties, crotchless emerald silk leotards, and other lingerie. Jingle bell bracelets adorn their ankles and wrists. Now and then some of them sing a chant I heard in the first vision of Madame Blavatsky:

After the bathing beauties, the next float back in the procession is the home of “Shotgun Marriages of You to Yourself.” It features a garlanded gazebo and life-sized papier-mâché figures of a tiger bride and wolf groom. Indigo, the Menstrual Temple’s only ordained Unitarian minister, is offering to officiate the wedding of any audience member who is brave enough to tie the knot with his or her own “bad self.”

I can make out a heavy-set man standing next to Indigo on the float, presumably undertaking the ceremony that she and I created for the occasion. I imagine with satisfaction how she’s prompting him to repeat the vows that will bind him to the magic of self-respect. “I will never forsake you,” he’ll promise himself. “I will unfailingly bless you with all the love I am capable of summoning.” And at the climax of the rite, Indigo will say to him, “I now pronounce you Husband and Wife.”

As I’ve been contemplating the wedding float, an amusing fantasy has sneaked up from my subconscious mind. In the parlance of the tantric code Jumbler and I have developed, I am seeing in my mind’s eye a vision of myself
shepherding a tender thunderbolt
. From the perspective of the English language, though, I am holding a hard cock. It vaguely belongs to a specific male who will soon be playing an interesting role in my master plan.

This is, I reiterate, happening in my imagination. I have never actually done such a thing in waking reality. My dear disembodied Rumbler and I messed around a lot in the Televisionarium when I was a teenager, although even there I never partook in what Rumbler has recently become fond of calling “wang dang doodle.”

It’s also true that Jumbler is not just a woman. With her amorphous
gender—testicular tissue mixed in with a uterus and ovaries, plus a rather sizable pearly root (tantric code for clitoris)—she’s a little bit of a man herself. And I have enjoyed thousands of erotic exchanges with her: marathon eyegasms, shamanic bellylaugh climaxes, crown chakra fluttergasms, and so many other varieties of bliss it would take eons to catalogue them with the detail they deserve.

Still, by most standards, I am a virgin in the realm of heterosexual sex.

And I have most definitely never held an actual erect penis in my hand.

In a few hours, that changes. Later tonight, to celebrate the ancient feast of Beltane, the May Queen will consort for the first time with a May King. The Chief Shamanatrix of the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail will take as her temporary husband a man who has been initiated into the mysteries of menstruation. I emphasize the word
temporary
. In my role as Global Initiatrix of the Fuckissimus, I plan to draft quite a number of temporary husbands in the coming years. Through it all, however, Jumbler will remain my freaky consort.

I should be clear, though, that I do not intend to be merely a nirvanic vessel of the Great Goddess during my direct engagements with tender thunderbolts. I will not be motivated purely out of duty to the noble goal of killing the bad apocalypse and resurrecting the good one. Carnal curiosity is a feeling I am most definitely not ashamed of.

I gaze with pride and joy back at the funeral parade snaking behind me. Almost everything I dreamed of has come to fruition. All the floats seethe with spooky but uplifting rituals which the crowd can’t help but yearn to participate in. In addition to the themes I’ve already named, there’s the display representing the “Proud to Be Humble” contingent of the Menstrual Temple, a group which for one dollar will kiss volunteers’ naked butts (or fully clothed if they’re too modest) while listening intently to them brag about anything their heart desires and asking them good questions to spur them on.

Behind that one is the “Videomancy” booth, where Burgundy, our resident oracle, is responding to seekers’ requests for divinatory advice by flicking on a good old-fashioned (battery-operated) television (not a Televisionary Oracle) at just the right cosmic moment to capture the
random phrase on a random channel that will supply the necessary guidance.

There are two roving Menstrual Temple therapists who aren’t confined to a float. Anna and Firenze are wearing T-shirts that advertise their special services to anyone in the crowd who asks: “Casting Love Spells on Yourself” and “How to Read Your Own Mind.” Now and then they also sneak in stage-whispered promos for “How To Stop Thinking About Yourself All the Time.”

Krista, five floats back, is giving “Emergency Dance Lessons for the Ecstatically Challenged.” The rhythmic, writhing strains of Feminist Orgy Network provide her soundtrack.

Near the end of the parade, though I can’t see them right now, Calley and Goolagaya are demonstrating “Laughing Sex Tantra” with the help of the Menstrual Temple’s answer to the inflatable doll, our eight-armed, ten-foot-tall scarecrow with a fully functional Televisionary Oracle in her belly. A little later, as we draw closer to the cemetery, the two chortling sexperts will begin initiating audience members into the mysteries of the reverse striptease, the art of playing strip poker with the sacred Menstrual Temple Tarot deck, and many other tantric specialties I’ve cooked up during my explorations of the Drivetime these last five years.

Among the performance art spectacles here today, I muse with pride, there are no crucifixes bathing in vats of urine. No chocolate-smeared comediennes jamming yams up their butts or tattooed torture experts lancing their chests with sharp steel rods (ho-hum) or midgets with strap-on dildoes smashing piles of televisions with sledgehammers. Ours is mischief after another manner.

Though I should confess that it’s not entirely original. There is another artist, the self-proclaimed “demonically compassionate” lead singer of World Entertainment War, who seems to have tapped into the same vein of sacred blasphemy that I have.

I grab the microphone and command the crowd’s attention. “I’m ready, beauty and truth fans,” I proclaim. “Are you ready? What do you say we start heading towards the crux of this lovely crock of bull. The question behind all our other questions. The holy probing fun that shatters all weak-hearted conceptions. Help me out here, my dears. Lead
me unto rosy red temptation. What chant is the Goddess horniest to hear? Where do all our explorations lead tonight?”

“What exactly are you doing to kill the apocalypse?” yells the crowd, spurred on by all the menstrual lingerie models here on the lead float.

“What?” I say. “What artifacts are you using to chill the cops’ lips?! What does that mean?”

The cry goes up again, more forceful and precise this time. “What exactly are you doing to kill the apocalypse?”

“Oh, now I understand you. ‘What exactly are you doing to kill the apocalypse?’ As in, ‘What progress are you making in your all-out war against the silliest form of death?’ Though to be truthful I hate to even dignify it by calling it death—it’s such an insult to the concept.”

I glance over at the Televisionary Oracle screen here on the float. It’s the scene of a mushroom cloud sprouting from the end of Jesus Christ’s erect penis, as if in an ejaculation, then breaking away from his body and floating skyward, only to morph into a giant psilocybin mushroom, which billows and blooms and bursts into a rain of thousands of smaller mushrooms. They fall to earth, where they are welcomed into the upturned mouths of women of all races wearing lingerie over their khaki soldier uniforms.

“So who’s first to testify today?” I call out. “Which of you beauty and truth fans wants to name the murderous love you’re invoking to slaughter the goddamn fucking end of the world?”

I’m not worried if there’s no one brave enough in the audience to leap up on the slowly-moving float and take a shot. There’ll be no dead time. All the menstrual lingerie models lounging on the beds have prepared spiels to deliver.

For a moment it looks like a middle-aged woman carrying a toddler is about to come forward, but she chickens out. I turn around and wink at Monika, the youngest member of the Menstrual Temple, who liked one of my texts so much she agreed to memorize and perform it.

She’s a big-boned, handsome dyke. Her menstrual lingerie consists of a velvet burgundy teddy under a see-through yellow tunic and sky-blue suede hotpants. I hand her the microphone.

“There’s a German actor named Udo Kier,” she begins. “He’s a specialist in playing villains. I read an interview with him where he just about jacked himself off bragging and swaggering about his own
idiotic nihilism. ‘Evil has no limit,’ he sneered, as if he were the first genius in the history of the world to arrive at that piercing insight. ‘Good has a limit,’ he blustered. ‘It’s not as interesting.’ Here’s what I have to say about that:
What a hackneyed, pompous ass!
Though it’s true most of the journalists in the world seem to agree with him. And I’m obviously in a minority in my belief that evil is a fucking bore. But how dare Udo Kier or anyone else proclaim that ‘good has a limit’ when there are so few smart artists and thinkers who are brave and resourceful enough to explore the frontiers of goodness?

“Which is where I come in,” Monika raves on, wrapping up her rant. “The way I’m killing the apocalypse is by studying really hard, working every day, to synthesize compassion and lust, irony and sincerity, bright enthusiasm and righteous rage. I’ve pledged not to automatically assume negative feelings are more profound and interesting and real than positive ones, or that pessimistic opinions are smarter than the optimistic kind. Amen and hallelujah, forever and ever. So mote it be.”