There is some “thing” you feel with someone, where you’re no longer in conflict, you feel a comeuppance, maybe attempted impregnation, and it all ends with an exceedingly low bow...As for Ramona, can you imagine how one woman can fill up an entire house with just her teeth? So much so that I resolved to take Celeste into my bedroom to show her a DVD of Magnolia, being polite, killing time for Crystal and witnessing from my somewhat altered and elevated viewfinder the way that she and everyone, for that matter, could not handle boredom anymore...that more and more time was not being murdered by killing or rather, that boredom was so feared that an entire industry had blossomed around the idea that you could somehow lick it with pharmaceuticals--by popping and re-popping greens, reds, yellows, whites, blues that somehow Boredom would go its merry way...but never and I mean never will Meister Bore vacate our precious premises...so get busy learning to smile and love him...
I can’t tell you how she entered the room, but with no ceiling, my guess is she floated in above my bed while Crystal and I were engaged in the film...about the time when the frogs at the end Los Angeles start falling from the sky in bloody and slippery succession, when those savvy enough to find the biblical reference said “brr, brr, she doesn’t give a damn about my bible” and consequently labeled Magnolia a hell of a film...So, now there were the two women, one twenty, one three more, and my thirty one years of perverse pretense...in the tiny bedroom overlooking the sea...It didn’t take long for two things to happen: first, Ramona noticed the altar in the corner of the room below the window that looked out upon the waters of the Caribbean...she saw Lama Kunga’s likeness, the tintype of his blessing, my sacrifices, incense ash and the books of I Ching and Tantra...second, after Crystal saw this look in the eye of Ramona, after the first five minutes of our ensuing conversation and exchange of eye sparkle, Crystal levitated from the room back to the conversation with my mother and Vera, obviously rich in proportion to the number of things she could afford to leave alone...
She left us alone...and at that moment I felt the patient endurance of mutilation and dismemberment, patient endurance of beatings, unjust abuse, reproof, contempt, degradation, threats, cuts, and ligament tears...and what ensued was two straight hours of inexhaustible research of each other’s more private selves...nothing physical, genital or general but the specifics of a contract that was being written, a set of utopian goals betwixt man and woman, her alternator, my generator, electricity misspellings and the quiet communication of our little selves and their tiny hopes...And yet I believed in no strong and solid basis for hope, only in Article 75 pinned to the asses of Celine, and I believed that I wanted and needed to see this woman wearing only a pair of white tube socks while laying on the very bed I slept in...there was always the resurrected continuing sizable threat of nuclear war, the doomsday clock with hands of fifteen movements, now nine minutes away from the unseen hot mushroom curtain exit...
When it was apparent that the women of the living room had tired of our bedroom tangent, I made a date for the next morning at Ramone’s Resort, where we would take in sun and wile away breeze-driven hours all the same getting closer to each other’s organs of reproduction...and though she had awakened the seven trembling dwarves in me, I feared that a courtship might make me weak, unstable, impermanent...leave me with a galled and ballooning denial...but a last glimpse revealed her sitting in a lion seat in a flower calyx bathed in a wild celibacy and I was sure to go on.
-Michael Price
