June 24, 1989

FIRST GLIMPSE OF THE SUN

I'm writing this from section 10, the maximum security mental ward of the state hospital in Ambrose, Massachusetts.

I was sent here for summer break from my boarding school - a medium security facility - where I had been detained for approximately 248 days.

Prior to my incarceration at Rotton Academy, I was handled by the Family; the head warden, chief psychiatrist and resident priest of which was my mother, she being the Facility wherein I was previously interred.

CHAPTER ONE: CONSEQUENCES

The trouble began when I started having hallucinogenic dreams about becoming my father Gene Simmons. My father is a bassist in the rock band SIKK. He says he has slept with over 4500 women. He is my favorite person in the world.

In the dream I was standing at the top of my parents' stair, listening to the heavy breathing of sex. In front of me was a large rooster, with blaring red eyes and a long black snake's tail. It hissed at me. As its body flew up at my face, I grabbed the beast's tail and whipped the creature around. I brought it down on the banister with a strength and rage I had never known before. When it stopped struggling I fed the tail into my mouth.

I wrote this dream into a story for an English class that dealt with the theme "Talk about Your Experience with Molestation and Sexual Assault." I showed it to my friend Amil.

Amil: Your cock's black in this story.

Me: My cock's coming from the Garden is why. It's where the monsters take over God's Creation.

Amil: Does sex always have to be coded this way? My skin is not the sign of expulsion.

Me: No - just that the paper is white and the writing is black. My body's the paper and my voice is my cock... it's my ...

Amil: ... it's your "black" self? That's stupid.

Me: I mean, I would like to annihilate the "white" space with these marks.

Amil: Then you would destroy yourself.

Me: Yes. Theoretically. For the experience.

CHAPTER TWO: TROUBLE

The story is: I am the witch and the executioner.

In the dark of a classroom on a Saturday night, I started making out with Amil against a blackboard. He clumsily put his hands up my shirt and kissed me with a lot of tongue. I buried myself in his black leather jacket and smelled him. I kissed his neck. He had the softest skin my lips had ever touched. He rubbed his hips against my thighs and belly. I had chalk everywhere, it fell like ashes from my hair.

The story is: the executioner and the witch go free and the audience gets all fucked up and burnt to death.

CHAPTER THREE: THE ANTI-CHRIST WILL FIND YOU.. or ..WATCH OUT WHAT YOU WISH FOR

It was shortly after the submission of my story for mid-terms that some of the Elders found me in the dining hall, and brought me over to the rectory. Concern weighed heavy on the faces of these balding white men of steel and stern education. They grabbed me and checked my breasts, wheeling me down the halls in a restraint vehicle usually reserved for ball players who've been broken on the field of play.

Once they got me to the rectory, they read my story aloud and told me my education was in great danger. Then four of them raped me while they played Wagner's Ring Cycle. After they were done, they licked each other's cocks clean and threw the draperies wide open so I could see the Elysian field of the school's inner circle. It was a grassy expanse with some poisonous apple trees where students would go on Friday nights to make out on their cashmere blankets.

I remember being in great pain that afternoon - in psychic pain as well as in the back of my brain - in the hypothalamus - where the pituitary gland sits and where all my sexual energy was really coming from. It was this tiny pea-sized area that suffered the most from the assault. I felt it shrivel while watching the power of my cock-writing being replaced by four bald men, telling me in unison that I had broken the Etiquette Code and so they couldn't let me go free without a trial and a ritual purging in the River.

The next events I remember only in remnants. They extracted a confession from behind my ear. They brought in the school counselor who showed me Rorschach images and asked me to make up stories about my father and her cunt based on shapes she blew in bubble gum. I told her lies and more lies, just like she wanted, but still they wouldn't let me free. Everything was evidence against me and in their defense.

I didn't know at the time that Amil was also in great danger. They had seen us hanging around together a lot, and since Amil's family had expressly told the Administration that he could only come to school there on scholarship to promote the image of diversity in elite education ONLY if it were guaranteed that he wouldn't have ANY MORE white girlfriends, well, even though we never touched in public somehow through surveillance or a stooge, they found out about us. That was grounds for solitary confinement.

Even though they knew Amil's daily schedule and could have found him anytime they wanted, they came for him under cover of darkness, after bedchecks, with 10 heavily armed men in flak jackets. Other guys in his dorm said there was some shooting, and Amil was slightly wounded below the knee, when they told him to put his hands up and the silver studs of his punk belt flashed like a candy wrapper.

While I was restrained in the sickbed under the Headmaster's white gauzy curtains, Amil was put into service as the Altar Boy and not allowed to go to class anymore, draw comics, row crew or use his drumset. Actually, they did allow him one Zadijian cymbal in his new room at the top of the bell tower, but he threw it out the high slatted windows toward the rectory, which is how he signaled me that he was trapped in there.

In one of these moments between repeated visits by psychiatrists and The Concerned, the copper colored disk I recognized as Amil's clanged against the chimney of the Rectory and fell crashing to the lawn in front of my window. I would have liked to reach out and get it, have something of his near me, but I was restrained by the wrists.

Looking out at the shiny disk, I imagined that Amil had scratched into the cymbal "some people are sick fucks" and I was glad to remember this.

All of us girls have been dead for so long.
But we're not going to be anymore.
- Kathy Acker

PROFILE OF A KILLER

My mother is a religious fanatic.

My mother is one of the straightest rulers around.

My mother went out of her way to get a brown toilet for her bathroom. That's so she doesn't have to look at all the piss and shit and blood mixing together.

My mother was a virgin. Virgins, according to her own father, the minister of a Methodist church in Indiana, are okay, but they are volatile and can be easily ignited by the wrong message. So you have to make sure that virgins especially don't listen to the wrong kind of people, don't get their ears fucked by bad ideas, because once ears have been broken in they just want to get fucked again, and again, but not by the same ideas. Those ears will become whores.

June 28, 1989

CHURCH WATCH

Daily during my incarceration I would get wheeled from the Rectory into an elevator and up to watch the sermon from a tiny window above and behind the pulpit. I could see through the window to the faces of crowded children in the pews, bracketed by faculty and staff members on their knees moaning and swaying. They could not see me, I was told, because my window looked like just another block of masonry from outside. It's no use gesturing with your eyes, and don't bother screaming, they said. No one can hear you.

The loudspeaker piped in the voice of the chancellor, familiar and corrupt. He spoke about the privilege of being there at school, loving God, and the privilege of letting the lord in. Let the Lord In. Let the LORD IN.

JESUS CHRIST IS ALIVE AND HE'S COMING IN MY MOUTH

HYMNAL (ABYSMAL):
Our father, hallow in heaven,
Thy name is kingdom, thy will be done.
Forgive all those who trespass against us.
Forgive all those who trespass against us.
Our daily bread can go to someone else who really needs it.
Peace at last, peace at last. We are ready to receive you, and have peace at last.

Rector:
All rise for the spreading of the eagle.

One by one the kids in the back row filed up the long passage of the cathedral. Footsteps echoed on the marble floors. The pipe organ blared some more Bach. Assembling at the foot of the stairs to the altar, they waited like cattle for the milking. The Rector donned a white robe stained with blood. He took his place at the altar and then on cue, I saw Amil bring in two buckets of red wine.

He was stooped under the weight of those buckets swaying from his shoulders. I focused on the head, tried to find his eyes. Are you still alive, Amil? Amil, please make a sign. He didn't look up once.

I was forced to take communion. My mouth was propped open with toothpicks. I screwed my eyes shut. They put the little wafer thin paper, like styrofoam, on my tongue.

When they took the toothpicks out, after the host had dissolved in my mouth like an acid tab, I began to feel Christ in my body. First, he felt like water. Then, he felt like a sewer. Soon, I felt like a river flowing toward the Holy Land. My body was dissolving into pieces, all of which added up to Him.

Except my cunt. My cunt was locked tight into the chair, still resisting, while the rest of me became a bitter shadow.

The voices of the choir below began the "Kyrie". I could not focus my eyes. At this point, they put the headphones on me and cranked the volume up. The soprano's voice - Katy Beckett - started like an alien whisper and expanded until she was thick like a fortress of angels in my ears. I felt my spirit moving upward, but at the same time breaking apart as it resounded off the walls of high pitch.

The feeling in my cunt was double to my mind:

[ ]

I opened my mouth to let His organ out, the instrument of His Divine Will. I could not feel my lips anymore for His Grace. My tongue was pulling up and back into my ears - and then I sang like Christ himself. I hit the highest note.

From the diaphragm, like the memory of a spasm now in remission, Christ clenched me and became like a fist in my throat. His power was at once immense and terrifying. I now know why they killed him. And I knew what I had to do.

AMIL'S PSYCHIC BRAINWAVES TAKE ME BY SURPRISE

The feeling in my cunt, which is mine and mine alone, is less than rational, but sufficiently more than irrational. The feeling in my cunt, like a television antenna with extra tin foil, is: reception of anything is possible if you have the right equipment.

My transmitter is glowing red. It is about to blow.

This is when I get the message from Amil. He sends me this brainwave pattern that starts in my spine and moves up into my hair follicles. If I had run my fingers through my hair I would have electrified the whole cathedral.

"I am still alive. Do not fear." I heard Amil as if he were just next to me, outside the headphones: "That is not me you are seeing, under the buckets. That is a robot Amil made by the science department. I was the model for the new Multicultural Standard, which will begin to be produced here by AP electrical engineering students with generous sponsorship from Deimler Christler."

"Soon they will not need me anymore," he continued, "except to ring the bell. I'm safe for the moment - until they fix the carolinger machine."

EYE WITNESS REPORT: HAP-C

The Human Animatronics for Peace commission began to meet regularly at school during that winter. They used the science lab, and gave extra research credits in the form of MDMA to Fifth and Sixth Form students willing to stay up for the 48 hour lab monitor shifts.

I found out that HAP was composed of parents/trustees who were board members of: General Dynamics, General Mills, General Foods, and General Motors, General Pictures and In General, An Office Supply Company.

The general purposes of HAP were to: promote the school image through mugs, shirts, china, baby sweaters and bumper stickers; control the future of political events by installing key thinkers of the HAP agenda within the news media; cast a pallor over dangerous ideas within the Academy, making them seem "unscholarly" and "unfit" for print; challenge the status of the debt-relief for third world nations plan by exposing its proponents as adulterers; find a way to extend the average life expectancy of CEO's by re-reading the Iliad and the Odyssey in large seminar groups; disguise truths within sentimentalized historical fictions that insist on Love As the Only Answer (God's love, praise Jesus).

The specific goals of HAP, however, were more specific. They were to replace all the trouble-makers at the school with robotic double versions, taking the real flesh-and-blood crazies out of the way so that Nothing would be able to interfere with the School Spirit.

After Amil, the next person to go was Marta, the Romanian albino with Multiple Personality Disorder. Then Gerald, the Fat Southern Racist. Then Barton, the lanky pianist who could suck his own dick. Tetsuo, the Yo-Yo Champion of the world who could recite 1000 digits of pi by heart, and Shallo, a hockey player who was known to weep at the sight of pussy.

The robot replacements were doing well, and there were few incidents of misbehavior. It seemed that by taking out the ring-leaders, other weaker students would more easily fall into line. In the School Room during Roll Call, students would pre-empt the calling of their name in perfect alphabetic allegiance to the school's organizational principles. They wouldn't fight over the Soft-Serve in the Dining Hall. They wouldn't walk off the path. They would arrive at Required Chapel on time, and all sing the hymnals with joyous uplifted voices.

The activities of the HAP-C really paid off when NBC came for a visit. This helped the school counter any bad press it had received months before when PBS did a documentary on all the spoiled rich kids, when they got people on tape talking about their ambitions: to have a house on Martha's Vineyard, drive a BMW, work on Wall Street and make a lot a lot of money, to become the President of the World, to fuck all the debutantes who were coming out that year, to own original Yve St. Lauren run-way designs, to take over the family meat packing industry.

When NBC came, this time all the kids said: they wanted to change the world, they wanted to help the poor, build houses in Guatemala, join the Peace Corps, and trade in green stocks. They wanted to open small business in poor neighborhoods selling birth control, work for the IMF to increase the flow of capital in the third world, be actors, artists and writers, sing on Broadway, provide chemically-positive neo-natal care to pre-diagnosed schizophrenics and at-risk youth.

POLITICAL DISSIDENTS

As long as Amil's robot could perform as the shoeshine man in the Parents' Weekend musical, he would be safe in the short term. But then there was someone else to worry about.

The Proctors never knew what to make of her until one day she carved some graffiti from the girl's bathroom into her arm. "Courtney sucks clit," she wrote. This they could finally understand, visualize, diagnose.

Before, no one from above paid attention. They dealt with her like garbage or unwanted kittens. While she screamed about the injustice of US involvement in El Salvador in the dining hall, they all just turned around and group-hallucinated her into silence. When she held a sit-in at Help the Homeless Day protesting against the members of the Parents' Committee who had been part of The Boston Land MASS Co.'s destruction of 400 tenement homes in South Boston, they threw blankets over her and 3 other girls and disappeared them into the woods of the Black Triangle for the day. That night she came back looking like a wet rat. I let her sleep in my bed, spooning around her tiny, frail, atavistic body.

Courtney is pure energy. An anorexic with a self-generating life force, she is sometimes frightening to behold. Sometimes she is entirely vacant of herself, and other times possesses the will of thousands. She is always present for Friday night services, which are broadcast over the satellite. Shabbat in the broadband doesn't make sense traditionally, but is comforting to the administration and to her equally, like a government-sponsored Yiddish radio project.

If they take Courtney out, no one will know it - except the few of us who might notice if she starts eating again. When they figure out how to make robots digest, that will be her death.

July 5, 1989

NOT A CONFESSION

When the School Counselor tried to brainwash me secretly I learned:

Confession is ultimately an erotic experience and those calling it forth from you are actually interested in getting off on your death. As you name your secret places you kill them and part of yourself. As your confessor listens to you, each name of each unknowable place becomes a berry bursting sweet cunt juice in his/her mind.

But though the name tries to become the thing, it never does.

While the Elders were out of the room, the School Counselor probed my mind for deep secrets. When she came in to make the psychiatric assessment, she witnessed the enormity of my cock, and was immediately both threatened and aroused. That's what happens in these places - simply, the cock itself is grounds for punishment - its rigid shape seen through the bed sheets - but anyone trying to administer healing actually wants you to service them sexually.

She asked me questions about the story I had written and my relationship with my father. How often have you seen your father's penis? How did he show it to you? Where did he used to touch you? How often did he touch you? I would answer the questions the way I had been instructed by the news media: I don't remember.
 
My lack of memory of the molestation was proof for her ecstatic imagination.

This is what she said to me:
This is just the tip of the iceberg.


This is how I made her hard:
I can't sleep anymore.


This is what she said to me:
Christ has come back to earth. 


This is how I made her hard:
I try to sleep but I'm often anxious.


This is what she said:
Christ is walking now upon the planet. I have friends, friends who have seen him.


This was my response:
I'm afraid everyone can see my cock.


She:
The second millennium is upon us. Praise Jesus!


Me:
I can't sleep when I have this hard-on. Please give me something to make it go away.

July 8, 1989

MY MOTHER AS MOBILE MEMORY AND REPOSITORY OF ALL TRAUMA

My mother told me stories about the world's intolerance.

My mother preserved a bubble of history in her breath.

My mother told me harrowing tales of Nazis and other bad men. She was hard-wired to remember moments in history that resembled the crucifixion.

My mother recounted how my father was grabbed by a bunch of older boys once when he was walking home from school and taken to the woods where they tied him up and pissed on him. They took their little cocks out in the woods and pissed on my father like he was the tree and they were dogs. These dogs called him names from the classical German-language anti-Semitic vocabulary and told him he was a faggot as they marked him as their territory.

My mother scrutinized me; I felt his shame in my heart.

Now when I close my eyes all I see is my father's face and his nose starts turning into a penis.

The true love story of my father and I is a tragedy of remote proportions. Although he and I both knew that we were meant for each other (we are so much alike!), we lived in two different temporal dimensions. Like waves that cross each other and keep going on in different directions though they have penetrated each other through and through, we loved each other. That's the beauty and the sadness in loving your father - you can both exist in the same space at the same time and never deform one another.

The silence of a thousand gathers and breaks on the helpless shore.

A BRIEF WORD ON THE DISAPPEARANCE OF COCKS


My mother's father had lectured to her often about the trials of faith suffered by Christianity because of the Holocaust. My mother knew that in order to complete the Oedipal circle with her own father she had to overcome this stigma and right the wrongs of the High Christian Order.  Like a military weapon with a homing device, she sought for my father unconsciously and when she found him she knew finally, this was The Way to Redeem Jesus.

My mother thinks: love is a duty, love is trial. But I understood: love is a question. If you don't have a question anymore, you don't have a love and the world evaporates slowly until one day you ask someone passing by: Where did it all go? And this question might start other questions that might lead to sex and more delightful asking.

To this day, my father Gene Simmons thinks mistakenly that his power and influence are due to the fact that no one ever took his cock away from him. He doesn't ever talk about those inequitable violent moments, and leaves their burden to my mother. My father refuses to realize the relativism of his cock, its ability to shift and migrate, that it's not just his, but all he touches, that his cock can belong to many.

I understood: When you are in love, you always have a question about the cock, one that you cannot bear.

July 15, 1989

WHY AMIL LIKED TO PISS ON ME

In the early days of our friendship, me and Amil would take our skateboards over the wall and sneak through the forest to the train. In Boston, you could skate lots of government buildings. We'd usually go to Government Center, or this weird little cement park with astroturf off the Green Line where kids were supposed to be but never were, or at least they were invisible.

When the cops came, we'd play Ditch 'Em. Amil could run faster and attracted more attention than me, so I'd get away to the women's bathroom in Faneuil Hall and wait for Amil to come meet me there.

Once, he narrowly escaped getting caught by this one skinny athletic cop with crooked legs. Luckily the guy had too much confidence in himself. Confidence kills. Amil came into the bathroom with blood on his neck where the guy had broken open his skin choking him. Amil says he kicked the cop and the cop fell down, which I believe. Then he told me how he put his boot into the cop's face and how he thought he killed him, which I don't believe. Amil is a punk and I never believe his tough-guy stories. Amil is the gentlest creature I know because he loves everything he is doing at every minute even when he's killing you, or pissing on you.

When Amil and me were in the bathroom hiding sometimes we'd play another game called Hitler Jugend where I would be in one stall and Amil would go into the other. We would both stand on the toilets and pee on the wall in between us and call it names like wasp and oreo. Our piss would run off the stall wall and mix there on the floor and this was pretty exciting considering we hadn't even been finger fucking yet.

THE RADICAL BODY PHILOSOPHY OF ME AND AMIL

During our short time of togetherness me and Amil used to do our homework side by side. We found a way to convert thought-energy into physical movements, and these movements were then easily converted back into homework. This is what we would do.

First he would take my feet and lick the bottom of my soles with his long tongue. Salman Rushdie once noted in The Satanic Verses that the feet of the Imam were impressed with the powerlessness of all those he had trampled over. Amil was priming my feet for the eventual compression of my flesh on the faces of the Rector, Head Mistress and Guardian Men Scouts that said they would always look over us.

We planned the insurrection starting at the feet because feet are made of sand and need to be edified or they will just sink back into the earth.

Amil would then show me his cock. It was always hard after he'd been at my feet. My feet were wet and slippery. He would put them together over his cock and start fucking the soles. I would lay on my back and recite a prayer for peace until he approached some kind of climax. He would indicate this to me with accelerated breath. Then I would change my peace chant to a call for revolution using lines from Hollywood films. It was different every time. Sometimes I would yell: This is your one way ticket to hell!!! Or, No More Mr. Nice Guy!! or, Die! Motherfucker!

Amil wouldn't come because he'd be laughing too hard. His deep laugh vibrated my body. He would open my soles so he could start shoving his cock into my opening cunt. There are some things I wish I could describe with words and this is one of them.

During our love-making we would tell each other a lot of stories. This heightened our pleasure and made it possible to start conceiving of new possibilities for new endings. I could often come up with a better ending for something he was thinking about because he would ask me a question, poised deep inside me, and then I could come up with something no one could expect.

July 18, 1989

BLOOD BATH

My mother has a curiously hysterical body that I doubt could ever have supported life. When my mother gets upset - really upset, like if I tell her, laughing to her face, that when she hits me it doesn't even hurt - when I upset her like this, or by fucking other girls in the house, she starts to bleed.

My mother has a spontaneously evacuating vasculatory system that releases blood pressure through her uterus when she feels overwhelmed by the urge to kill me. We have to take my mother to the hospital and try to explain that no one touched her, that we are all innocent, but my father with his olive skin and Semitic features seems to be a good scapegoat and has gotten booked twice. By now he knows that protesting is useless, and would just make things worse. He's already marked for this role, blood on his hands and my pale mother lying there unconscious, just bleeding, with me holding her by the wrist.

Once I had to bail my father out of jail. He is a smart guy and always leaves a couple thousand in cash in the bookshelf in case of an emergency. I went to the shelf, took down the small yellow linen book - "Privat" - and extracted the cash from the secret panel. I went to the police to pay for my father. When my mother woke up, she testified and cleared the whole thing up, but that was only after I nearly shit myself thinking that I had finally done it, finally knocked her into a coma and my dad might have to rot in prison.

When I got pinned into the psych ward in the Rector's house this time, my mother found it within herself to bleed the most motherfucking huge hemorrhage. This time though, instead of blaming my red-handed father, they found a tumor the size of a grapefruit growing in her womb.

This is when I realized that hysteria across the nation is breeding alien life forms.

July 20, 1989

THE BANNING OF THE CLAM

It was written into the School Code that Friday was Good Clam day.

Roger Mulroney, the most adorable and sexy misogynist at the school, would hold court at the upper table of the Dining Hall and parade around his extensive and constantly expanding vocabulary of clam jokes, double-entendres, lewd mouth gestures, and foul eating behavior. This would cause a general rally of testosterone around the main meal, making it hard for the Girls Field Hockey Team to eat that day, or the next. Estranged from their clams, and looking for any good excuse to practice anorexia, the Team relished Fridays and was sure their 5-year winning streak was attributable to this phenomenon and to the newly-issued double-panty panty, instituted by the School Counselor when too many girls complained that their fans weren't watching them play, but were only at the games to look up their skirts.

The rest of us, geared toward the girls vs. boys afternoon soccer match, found Mulroney's clam antics to be destructive to our team's energy and spirit and so we complained vocally during the meals.

Several female teachers at the school, recognizing the dirty strategies of Roger Mulroney and the Misogynists to be very similar to corporate and board room antics meant to keep women from advancing to senior positions and to keep secretaries in their places, decided to drug the Rector at Wednesday Euclid Cocktails after which they were able to reason him into placing a ban on saying the word "clam". They were trying to help us win the soccer game, but in effect, this only made matters worse.

Once they banned "clam," several other things fell into place for the Misogynists. Now that they couldn't say "clam," they resorted to a host of other delicious vocabulary words to ridicule our genitalia, including but not limited to

pike, poke, fishy
what's-it-called
norm
party place, tickle time, round about the hatcher
tiddlewink
mistlefrock
tibbet, ribbon, wretcher

Mildred
Martha
Judy Chicago
mossy, eater, grafter

smelty, malty, grapey
satchel
leather, button, brisket

treble clef
priss pie
wind pipe, old bag
breath-of-death, neatly folded hanky

sixes-and-sevens
purple Prussian dancer
tuna boat, triple lux, fantastic...

Once the language of the pussy was released from its clam shell, it became very hard for anyone to get any work done. Infinite meaning is a dizzying place. The cunt breeds vertigo.

Recognizing the effect of the mistake and the potential liberation of the female body into language, two poles of thought became established at the school. One pole of thought was represented by the Rector, who stopped this expansive associative polluting network of obscenity by banning language itself for a period of one month, from the school.

The other pole of thought was represented by the lovely ageless sprite Madame du Prey. She was the French teacher and had one grey hair for every century she had lived. We knew she was a witch because her name was French and she was known to pinch her husband on the ass in public. They had been trying to kill her for a very long time, but luckily her magic powers had not given out. She would send messages to the girl's dorm in the form of pizza or nice erotic thoughts. We thanked her with secret praise in the bathrooms during group showers which looked to the surveillance equipment just like shaving, but were really much much more than that.

Madame du Prey had the extraordinary ability of being able to smell you out if you'd just had sex. She could smell come in the air from the other end of a room and see your cunt quivering under your clothes. Because she was a good witch, she celebrated these moments with smiles, winks, and approving nods.

In her house, Madame du Prey had a variety of kinky sex equipment that masqueraded as life support systems for her own mother, who lived with her, and for her daughter, a recovering hemophiliac.

Madame du Prey and her husband used to take weekend trips to Boston for witching conferences, where they discussed problems at the school, for instance, the language ban. Since she was telepathic, there was no huge rush about solving this one, as she could keep us informed about her progress while we all sat silently in Study Hall, writing pornographic stories to each other and drawing pictures of cunts and cocks on our notebooks.

July 24, 1989

VANITY

One day, to our chagrin, we discovered that there was a plant amongst us. He looked and acted like a girl, but was really a mean old man witch hired by the Rector to wreck du Prey's plans. We knew he was a plant because only witch men don't bleed. They can do everything else almost like a girl, but the blood's the truth. Words are just words, but blood is the ink, the stain on the sands of time.

Vanity was his name. He lived on my floor, at the end of the hall. I was getting to be friends with her - we'd listen to Michelle Shocked and make beaded bracelets that doubled as cock rings.

Vanity told me:
"Last night as I lay sleeping, I woke to see a lonely figure of a woman hovering
over me. I wasn't afraid. She comes to visit me in the night all the time. Once
I sat upright in bed and screamed, "Who are you? Who are you?" As if I didn't
know. She is my mother. She tells me stories about my childhood, stories I don't
want to hear and often can't remember.

I asked her:
What do you mean?

S/he:
I am a survivor. Somehow it is all too easy to forget those things that traumatized
the soul. This phantom woman in the night reminds me. Everything I do in life
revolves around working out the problems created by her, the woman in the night
who long ago terrorized an innocent child.

I asked her:
How did she terrorize?

S/he:
If it had been done with knives and loaded guns, it would be easier to deal with.
But instead she took my affection for her and turned it into a sordid relationship
involving sex.

Me:
What do you mean?

S/he:
My first recollections of our interaction, when I was three, involve me sitting
happily between her legs in a bathtub, both of us naked.

Me:
Okay...

S/he:
I also remember her standing in front of me rubbing her breasts...

S/he:
At other times, she would fret over whether my bowels were all right. A regular ritual
was a cleansing enema of sudsy water made with laundry detergent. I still recall the feel
of the tile bathroom floor as I lay there on my left side while she administered the
preparation. 'Breathe deeply,' she would say while we waited for her brew to work.

S/he:
Those moments were the most traumatic of my life. That's why I'm so fucked up
right now. I can remember those things and they're just a partial memory. But I don't
remember the rest of what could have happened!

I asked her:
Are you happier with or without your memories?

S/he:
My memories give me a reason to live. Otherwise I would be boring and pathetic and my fear would have no purchase.

TELEPATHIC MESSAGING IS NOT EXEMPT FROM SURVEILLANCE

I called du Prey that night while lying in bed. She was very busy at night, as most witches are, so I ended up falling into a deep sleep.

I woke up on the ground in a moon beam, with Vanity standing over me.

Vanity: I need your help. I'm playing a joke on the boy's dorm. Here, eat this.

I struggled against her, but she was so much bigger than me. She shoved some pills into my throat. I couldn't breathe with her hands over my mouth so I swallowed. I asked her what they were.

Vanity: It's just some EZ Move. You'll have to take a really big dump in about 1/2 an hour, and I want you to do it in this pan.

I was given a small pie tin and a kiss on the forehead that smelled like mothballs. Then Vanity tied me to my bed with some soft wet cloth and left the room.

Again, I tried to call du Prey. I was in a weakened state and something smelled strange still, like a cleaning fluid. It made my head hurt. I fell asleep again.

I woke up to Vanity again, over me like a big dog, massaging my stomach and intestines and licking my neck. She had the pie tin underneath my ass. I felt the cramping as all the shit pressure building up inside me bubbled forward. My anus opened and a machine gun fire stream of pieces flew into the pie tin. I let myself be fondled again for a few more rounds of release. Vanity licked my clit and bit me until I came, though it was a minor orgasm. I was still dizzy from her fumes and feeling slightly sick to my stomach.

She left with the pie tin, and me still tied to the bed.

SHIT BROWNIES

Whatever made Vanity do that to me in the middle of the night, I liked it. Not immediately, not while my ass was bleeding and my wrists burned, but later when I could think back on the experience and get the most amazing hard-on, just instantly.

Sometimes memory is better than experience. Or, experience is just a vehicle to building up a good archive of memory. So that no matter the circumstance of your physical body, your mind has interesting places to go.

August 1, 1989

RECONCILIATION: MY FATHER ATTENDS THE WRONG WORKSHOP

"I didn't know the difference between consensual sex and rape."

"I didn't know that when my boyfriend wanted sex, I could say no."

"When a psychiatrist sticks his finger in your vagina, it isn't therapy."

"Recovery is not easy. I have to find ways to give back the shame I have carried
with me all my life. It is a tedious task."

Sitting in the circle of survivors, my father is listening but he is not listening. His turn comes.

He says:
"Hitler was a real famous fucker. He fucked me and a lot of people I used to know. But he wouldn't admit to it because he had a lot of class aspirations and so he turned his anger into the dust of genocide and the snows of hate.

"I have to understand what happened to me within the frame of my social position. I am an upstanding member of my community. I am a pillar of good taste, sensible business ethics, and concern for the health of the economy. I have to understand what I desire for my children within this frame. As a Jew, I am debased, even if no one knows I am a Jew because I changed my name. I feel it deep inside, like desire, like shame, like the need to become something I am not. I only want to achieve some reconciliation with history."

THE PERVERSION OF CAPITALISM IS INSCRIBED ON THE BODY OF THE JEW

My father, the ultimate capitalist, has made gold out of a life of eating coal for breakfast. Ash on his lips.

In capitalism, because one thing can be infinitely exchangeable for anything else, it is easy to move signifiers around. The body of the Jew is a mercantile body, one that adapted early on to the system of exchange. On the body of the Jew, the nose becomes a penis. The penis is a castrated penis. The penis is a clit.

August 12, 1989

I HAVE A TELEPATHIC CONVERSATION WITH MY FATHER GENE SIMMONS

When my mind's open to my father, I feel him there. He takes any opportunity to make relations with me. But my brain's also there. Not a thing, but an organ. An organ of relation that makes history live again.

Me: I know you are a hallucination of my ever-expanding cunt consciousness. You are my father but you are also an apparition. You turn me on with your nothingness and your quiet despair.

My father: Did I ever tell you? That in 19th century Viennese slang - what my parents and grandparents spoke in addition to Yiddish - a clitoris was referred to as the Jud? You should know this. You should know that you have a little Jew, and that the Jew is you. Embrace your cunt as you would try to embrace history, time and memory. Welcome this little castration as your heritage. Welcome its awkward presence into the world of Men.

I congregated all of my energy, closed my eyes and took that dick off his face. It was the moment I had the most power in the world, but it was an addictive power and it made me insane. For once you've castrated your own father, you are both ashamed and an outcast, but also a hero. You have freed him and yourself and the meaning of the cock itself which can be now everywhere at once and not just once.

Me: Why didn't you tell me about my Jud before?

But my father could not answer, for he was a sun beam - a ray of light burning my eye.

August 13, 1989

BACK IN THE PSYCH WARD, MY BEAUTIFUL COCK REAPPEARS TO ME

They gave me Zanex, Percocet, Lomotil, Paxil, Rogaine, Wellbutrin, Lithobid, Sodium Cyanide, Levaquin, Zithromiacin, Valium, Imiprimine, Morphine, Viagra and two Aspirin.

I slept it off while unspeakable acts continued to be visited upon my body.

My sleeping frame was an empty space for the Rector's manifest destiny. Under the influence of so much medication, I could not pay my mortgage. My home went under foreclosure and was subsumed by the school under Clause 34.2 of the Entrance Exam agreement, making it a rather generous donation to the Annual Fund.

When I woke to my new homeless state, still nauseous with some internal bleeding and bloodshot eyes, I fell immediately into a natural state of recuperative REM. In my dream, my cock appeared. I had it in my hand. I could feel my erection. I could play with it. I could press on the stiff member and feel it push back. I saw that it was integral to my flesh. I was overjoyed at its arrival.

At once, the dream became many dreams, of many women across the planet. I felt all of them rejoicing at this cock and knowing it was theirs. It could be equally and infinitely shared. Distribution would take place among the invisible psychic network.

I looked down at the stiff member in my hand. It became four. I was holding four of my cocks together in a bunch like fat asparagus. Another cock grew out of my rib. Another began to emerge from my left nipple like a rocket ship.

My body had entered harvest season. I realized I could feed the world.

August 14, 1989

I AM JOAN OF ARC, OR, THE WAY THIS STORY SHOULD END

Using secret short-wave radio transmissions through my tooth fillings, I was able to send and receive messages from Amil in the bell tower. These had a much different quality than telepathic waves for they were scratchy and unpredictable. But they were much harder to hack into and almost impossible to trace.

We thought about the best way out of this predicament. The future was a possibility, a metaphor with endless ramifications for our pain and suffering now. Imagination would end this condition, I was sure of it. Projection as time-travel.

Amil: But you are escaping into your mind, like you've always done. What about the world? What about me?

Me: You are in my mind. Lodged deep. From there, we can think frightening alternative realities into the daylight and the consciousness of these rapist monsters.

Amil: You're just the worst kind of liberal. Your conscience may be full of me. But I get the shaft. I am the one in this prison. You are poison.

Me:

I grit my teeth and clamp out the radio transmission for a moment. This is not my version of a secret double agent collaboration. This is a domestic quarrel. My family is repeating itself inside me - radio vagina dentata. These transmissions will surely breed some other kind of insanity.

Me: Okay, Amil. Look. I'm going to find some way to get you out of there. Or find people who can help you get out of there. Or at least stop thinking that everything's okay just because our minds are so powerful but our bodies restrained.

Amil:

Me: Alpha One? Do you read?

TRANSMISSION ALPHA ONE

Amil has connections I don't know about. I don't know a lot about Amil. He was my best friend in my head, but in the real world, I didn't know the half of him. I realized this one day after another gynecological exam, where they gave me three frontal abortions to prevent the growth of any more abnormal tissue inside my head.

I was laying there on the gurney in the sunbeam by the large french doors, recovering with a cold compress and a mint julip when Amil's face appeared out of one of the bushes to my right.

As a hallucination, this would have been fantastic. But as a reality, I was scared shitless. I tried to make him go away.

Me: I have a headache.

Amil: I want to fuck.

Me: The last time we fucked ... I had several problems with my internal organs. They told me I had a lot of damage and bruising. They told me I had been raped by my father repeatedly in the night. But it was you. You violent fuck.

Amil helped me escape the ward. He took me out through the garden and behind the Rectory in the Blue Woods. He leaned me up against a tree and pressed his large mouth over my chin, traveling his tongue down my neck and back up again to my lips where my large black cock tongue awaited him, trembling behind the inhaled hiss of breath through my teeth.

It was here, in the middle, when we were interrupted by my father.

TRANSMISSION LOVE GUN

My father Gene Simmons sent me and Amil a short but concise transmission. He sent us an image of him with in full make-up, with the huge silver codpiece and platform thigh-high boots, with his mother under one arm, blowing away the Rector with bellowing bursts of sound. The microphone was like an Uzi and the spray from his mouth was killing the righteous Christian.

THEY SCREAMED AT HIM:

WE HATE YOUR MUSIC! YOU KILLED JESUS!

The lynch mob gathered at the edge of our imaginations as my father bellowed out his last erotic stand.

ALMOST HUMAN
By: Gene Simmons

Ahh, ha
I'm almost human, can't help feelin' strange
The moon is out, I think I'm gonna change
You're so smooth and tender, a living, breathing dream
I've got to have you, baby, I'm listenin' for your scream

I'm almost human, I'm almost a man
I'm almost human, ooh

I'm almost human, baby please don't run away
'Cause wherever you run, I'll be a scream away
I'm very hungry and you're what I'm thinkin' of
Ooh baby, baby, baby, so hungry for your love

I'm almost human, oh, almost a man ... I'm almost human, whoo ... I'm almost human, I'm almost a man ... I'm almost human, I'm almost human ... I'm almost human, I'm almost human... I'm almost human, almost, almost, almost a man ... I'm almost human ... Almost, almost, almost, almost, almost, almost human ... I'm almost human, I'm almost human ... I'm almost human, almost a man ... I'm almost human, almost, almost, almost ... I'm almost human ...

THE ORIGIN OF WRITING

I dream of my father's penis in my mouth - wake swallowing my tongue.

finale

THE FATHER IS UNCONTAINABLE -- DAILY SPILLED AND DAILY REPLENISHED

At some point in this journey, I was freed from the institution. Not really by anything done or not done, just that the waiting was finally over.

Once you have been waiting indefinitely as a prisoner in this way, no matter what you think of each day you realize those thoughts are powerless against the forces of the world to bring about change by themselves, and time to wear away time.

I didn't hear from Amil for some years. I assume, though we never speak of it, that he went into hiding for his association with the Billionaires in Space Program (BISP) debacle. After completing an aeronautical engineering degree in Florida and working for Boeing and then NASA for a stint, Amil was picked up by Hugh Packer to be part of an elite team at the BISP, working in the upper echelons of the service industry to insure safe and happy travels into orbit aboard a luxury rocket liner.

Somehow, 20 billionaires "disappeared" on their maiden voyage, losing all contact with major media sources and earth communications for 2 years. In that time, all their personal holdings were liquidated by simulacrum robot hijinxers. No one caught on until the billionaires themselves returned from space, glad to have their lives on earth back, though things would "never be the same."

I've saved all the news clippings and testimonials, which Amil and I read together sometimes, at the side of the sea. We live at the very edge of the land because this is where we feel we have been pushed, and where we have chosen to stake our last ground. There's a lot of good weepy prose in these historical moments that tickles us. The fear for the safety of the billionaires, the descriptions of their hardships - "we had to eat our own shit!" -, not to mention the other historically important events happening concurrently like the erasure of third world debt, the subsidizing of generic AIDS drugs for sub-Saharan Africa and the Asian sub-continent, not to mention the institution of global green energy laws.

I often stand in front of Amil to look into his eyes. He takes my head between his hands. I feel his long delicate fingers in my hair and his thumbs on my temples. Reaching into me with one long gaze, he starts to kiss my eyes in their corners, he lightly brushes the lid and then I look up as he nuzzles my nose. Staring straight into me, head pressed into mine, our eyes merge the other's eyes into a tunnel.

I reach down between his legs to feel a hard cock under my touch, innocent of all the imagination I have had for cocks in my past. This cock is unique and vulnerable. It demonstrates for me his need and his most inner softness. We kiss a lot when we make love, lips pressed to each other in lock-step. We find a third rhythm between us here.

I take him to our bed and pull him down on top of me. I receive his tongue as he tastes me and tells me I am delicious. This expected moment in my narrative is also where my tale breaks off, and the language of our encounters continues pulsing beyond visible metaphors. I feel the throbbing and tingling of these moments like being charged in a battery-powered net, with colors I have never seen before refracting back behind the infinite screens of my electric lids. What is left in the waste around this practice is a temporary release of desire to change anything and to instead dissolve. We want to do this often, this collapse with sexual force of body and coherence and hope, so that we might feel ourselves reconstitute again.