Sleeves

Wear your darkest thoughts on your sleeve, is the teaser to a piece written by Gus Visco, something I have not read, but just took from the neighborhood mailbox library as I walked against a warm for December wind, my dog Angel taking a dream drink from the metal bowl set out too by the owner of the house. Rich without taste, exotic plants in no preplanned arrangement covering the view lot attached, that once was another address, a pink house—I’d attended the estate sale--knocked to the ground.

I am reading Erlo Van Wavren and all his past life, borderless dreams about the age of Aquarius—acceptance of the shadow side of Christ and though I have dreams of knowing which floor boards are soft and liable to break through in a freshly rehabbed church, I find the literary journal I pick up this morning from the mailbox library especially earthy and human with its Jimmy De Sana dungeon photos, which I in all of my talk and thought of embracing the dark-side, being okay as a shadow-worker, cannot in good faith take.

So what are these, my darkest thoughts? That I am not able to embrace the fat woman, a neighbor whose husband was in my psycho-drama group, who died of liver cancer, hepatitis C after years of drugs and street sex and he himself had forgotten he had told our group four or some years earlier that he had the disease.

I started to cry on his announcement of liver failure and possible transplant, sure he was going to die and the other members pointed wooden fingers and pinched eyes my way for being such a negative ninny. But, it’s a major organ, I cried! You can’t live without your heart or lungs--without a liver!

I wanted to quit the group, found myself without insurance, therapist offered I pay only $5 a time and convinced me it was very important to stay at it as long as Michael was alive. I did. He loved me. He loved Halloween. He died in September though he kept saying he was going to make it to Samhain. He was delirious. His wife decided to round all up, an army to clean her filthy house, buy toilet paper for the guests, decorate the house and dress up for a party so that he could finally let go, St. Michael could be carried away in this thin veil.

She let me know that he wanted me to dress up as Barbie. Not something the part of me who’d graduated with a degree in gender studies wanted to do, but I did. Borrowed a blonde wig from a transvestite, wore heels and blue eye shadow. Michael in top hat and black sleeves, loved the look, another group member dressed as Ken, a Barbie doll in his tweed-jacket breast- pocket, a nametag that read, Ken, I’m with Barbie. His real name was Ken, so not as offensive.

Towards the end of the evening, Michael announced that all of the men, and Barbie of course, were going down to the local brew pub to have one last beer. Someone wrestled him into the car with his IV drip and off we went.

Though his wife had asked me to play this part, assured me she wanted to and so supportive were the rest of the group at pleasing him in this way—any last wishes--I don’t think she ever forgave me for him asking that I be the one by his side, and again that dying week, when he, a skeleton begged me to lay next to him on his red, living-room couch.

And, now she appears an apparition in several of this week’s dreams, riffling through my wallet, washing dishes in a church kitchen, and another on the previous night sitting drunk and smoking in a car, fat as circus mamma and had stolen my laundry soap. When confronted, she waved me off, told me she’d write me a check.

What, I think in the tub, are my darkest thoughts? Perhaps, that I am able to stand next to, but not really look at the sinister parts of humanity, that I avoid these, that I feel assaulted by their sickening, drunken, thrown-up, putrid acidity—that I am too light, why draw to myself this monstrous other?

And, who wants to drink from a plastic cup when they can drink from glass?

How to hang it up? A clock, and I took a small nail to a timepiece in last nights dream and with first, light-strike of the hammer, all was smashed--exploded into a million and one tiny glass and plastic bits resting atop, and working themselves deep into, a shag carpet, needing to be cleaned up before the drive home.

Photo Credit: XINYI SONG/unsplash