When I met them both I played heavy towards Celeste because I knew her straw was shorter and because there I was a gentleman grimacing at the sounds of the second-rate musician and his cursed electronic piano banging around in the air behind us...Ramona could say hello but most of her conversation took place in her eyes and gestures...flash, proprioception, nerve...she knew very little English I could tell...There was, in the newness of that night, convenient fictions parading around in the guise of small talk as Celeste and I went through the motions of courtesy, filling the ears of one another with our precious how-did-we-get-here fantasies...and the Drinks...the drinks had to become kinetic, one after another, everyone was in agreement on this concept--including my mother--that the exchange of money and booze would be none other than the bloodline, the psychic stream of liquid manna from which we could siphon off courage, outrageousness, and the seeds for our eternal suffering...It was from this vantage that my shadows moved closer towards reality and the circumcision of my manhood...there was some angling going on between Ramona and I for our proximity increased... at the bar on a couple stools where I could get my legs in close to hers and rise from history...I broke the dam on my broken Spanish, not used since some ill-trips in college days to Mexico, and it was a miracle the way those verbs and sentence constructions came back to my lips, dormant since the sprint age of 18...could a poor soul such as myself, having lived the life of an American without travel, without maddening dreams of anything beyond my hometown, and only calculated San Francisco nights of full tremelo ordinary-ness plus old stag film bravado, could I really have all of this, this Ramona?.. I had had none of it and could only speak lowly English, never that I could speak another tongue! But--here it came, Spanish for the love of cunt--from my mouth, for the love of beauty...I had it going!
I asked her where from, how where, how old, when this, when that...I interjected, pontificated, and maneuvered in broken Spanish and she was taking it in beautifully, answering with care, making sure I understood how delicate her life was...and I'm thinking the yin energy of dark earth, the irrefutable MAYA of feminine existence put here on this earth to move man to the edge of his sanity—I'm thinking of her naked, raw, in cahoots...lovely broken front tooth, Oakland freckles, brown eyes, occult skin, the holy whole of her...where were she taking me that I hadn’t been...thhe hand of a woman held me...If I had been smart or even lucky, I would have dropped it all right there, all of WOMEN, but to do so, to lose their particular smell, to stop looking, tasting, and being wholly consumed, this is difficult and rare...So I watched the hands of Ramona, searching for reasons to condemn them, but could only find perfection...
-Michael Price
