I was deep into fixing problems and catching up on poet communiques when I heard my sweet mother asking the lovely Ramona to dinner at her house for the approaching evening, and in the chitter-chatter language barrier shyness she accepted on behalf of herself and Celeste and the date was set and the unbelievable town-wide invasion of her beauty went on and like a flame of dreams and the rest of my day was lit up so that when I did finish writing missives to far-away companions and starlots, they were free from death and birth and burned across the technological frontier with an immortal vigor, exploiting my new-found new-place hover-bliss and infecting my friends like a rose-hewed plague...and anticipation...they were loquacious diatribes about the western one-street town of sand streets and taco stands where I was coming of age...
I had also met, the night before, my mother’s sunburst sixty-two year old new best friend, the voracious and time-defying Puerto Rican phenom Vera, whose skin and features spoke of 20 less years, and speak they did often and vibrantly...I had sized her up immediately and figured if nothing else came to pass that a few leaps up the age pole and atop Vera would do me no harm...and she knew how to have fun, as she could dance and out-dance any woman of any age and her hips never stopped moving when there was music in the air...and in the blessed tropics music was always playing...the gramophone blared out a popular tune, the disc jockey spun the colored light of punta--a synthesizer heavy upbeat dirty down bass tempo local dance music--which could drive a man off his axis...
But Vera for God's Sake, was always on and if I was anything in the tropics, it was definitely somewhere to the opposite of off...For you see, almost everyone in my life to that point had come to believe that I was becoming dangerous and nasty and would cause trouble every chance I got......that I was somewhere down on the level of the snakes, that I was somewhere over their head...and they didn’t read books and they didn’t look at the raven in the same way that Burton saw it as protection out on the highway past the terrible Herbst’s and the Den Del’s of Devil’s Gate Auto in Austin Nevada, the way I saw blackbirds as signs of Burton’s highway adventure love, that I too was being guided through the miles of desert and the ten thousand nods...They couldn't see that I needed to get as dirty as possible to cleanse the innards!God damn I have to get the nothingness back into words! The gravity of literalism, Linearity, and 1987! They won’t leave me! I mean who wouldn’t, my age, my situation, with my healing light, my cock, think about bedding down with Vera? I don’t try to make burlesque, don’t need to create controversy, but hell, the woman was a woman with oceans of flames of passion and lust and I was a Picasso, a Gallimard, the making of John C. Holmes without the girth and length...And Vera was coming to dinner as well so it was me and the Ladies and I wasn’t afraid of laying it on too thick, of making my man presence felt and using it to entertain and charm...like steak with all the trimmings...which is all a man in a company of women is good for...
So it came to pass like a big black german gothic looking bird on a beer can... we ordered dinner from Papi’s Diner, and eclectic family one room dive with bad light and super food...We had it delivered to the house by one of papi's sweet fat girls, and it came in plastic bags all hot and porky, as Papi made the best grilled pork chop in town....we ate like fools and I marveled at my good fortune to be surrounded by the most important women in my life up to that point..and then it became Chatter...women chatter...
And me. Now, as men, we are confused matter, and who can withstand the fair daughters of Venus? The choice is between partial incorporation and total annihilation...acting the part or total fusion...I couldn’t keep my eyes contained in their cavity of orbit...like a giant white dwarf, Ramona had my moons in her gravitational pull...this organ of special sense was blessed out, and I drifted in and out of her gaze totally god damned blown away...and on and on went the talk of who was fucking who, what men were married and running from wives, what hags those wives were, how the whole game was unfair, and this is my mother saying half of this stuff but it was Vera who went wayward with the ebb and flow of her one year affair with this six foot five Albert, the stories heard for the first time of the drunken boat trips, the sleep-overs, the great fucking, the stories that later I found would be repeated again and again, that tired me so...but this night I didn't care...and all of a sudden it went from funny to something like an attack of brain fever and she went on like a sudden breach-of-promise suit razing the courts and we were the unlucky courtesans receiving the woe, the heartache, the BULLSHIT! God how humans can make sorrow out of nothing! So my sexy Vera was afflicted with the dreaded verbal shitpipe that wouldn't shut off! Her stories were so doddering, neither absurd nor inexplicable, just narrow and predictable...So I say, "Be on notice!", you are under surveillance and scrutiny...a man so warped as to contest the lawsuits of women and win...well, it was me and I was comeuppance incarnate!
-Michael Price
