Something Solid: Aughts Philly: The E Sequence (Ecstasy)
The Painter
The compact red book I ran
around with: Crowley’s Book of the Law. I
was goaded into knowledge that a reckoning
was at hand. An archetypal Goddess had
manifested as a tactile reality in my life.
An image had been seared into my mind; a painting
called The Vessel; it was hers, & yet I was a
married man. The only path forward that tempestuous
autumn of ‘01 was to cheat. The book laid down a
gauntlet of what it meant to act in the world
with a genuine sense of destiny; to be a man who had
the mettle to be a real force of nature. She
knew, my wife, that I had been possessed, & that
winds were blowing me in a new direction, towards
the forbidden.
I had, it seemed to me, no
choice. The night I spent with the painter, in a
studio in PAFA, I discovered what it meant to
have a hinge to true will about matters of the
heart. She kept paintings there, of Dionysus
& Apollo, & she would make me a myth, too. We
shared red wine that had the effect of
being blood between us; our chalice was the air,
the sound of water pipes late at night in an old
building, darkened corridors meant to hold only
us, bathrooms which could be used as
portal-ways into starry worlds. As I gathered steam, I
felt the book hover in the air as well, a
piece of text writ in boiling blood, pummeling
towards spring.
The Studio
The vista which then opened was
one I never could’ve anticipated in the
Nineties— the PAFA campus was set as a series of
jeweled buildings smack in the center of Center
City Philadelphia, a few blocks from City Hall.
Mary was then still in enough good standing to
maintain her own studio on campus. I had to sign
in as a guest on the ground floor every time I
visited. The room was a large rectangle, &
the elongated back wall was one big window, looking out
on the western progression of Cherry Street,
towards Broad. Until Mary & Abby, I had no fixed
notions of painting; now, I dived in with the
frisson of one let loose in a wonderland. Everything about
Mary was magical to me, & the canvases
arrayed around the studio, largely male nudes, recumbent
or not, plugged into Mary’s fascination with
classical mythology, & made a case for Mary as a Don Juana,
a seducer of men. Heady stuff, & often Mary’s
tales were about men who had posed for her.
Vertiginous, but I was on the verge, nonetheless, of a
full-on love affair, maybe marriage, to a women powerful
enough to be called a Creatrix, a female goddess in
the world, & I knew it. Sleeping with Mary meant
something it never could with others; rather than a mere
palliative, if you could get her to put out in the
studio, you were plugging into a mythological web, glistening
& intricate, stitching yourself, possibly, into
history, & the come was in color—
Riot Grrrl Prize partridge around Media,
Mary was also a bad seed or rebel par excellence.
She doped & fucked her way in divergent directions;
got dropped into hospitals; rode with her assumed husband
on a motorbike; in the parlance of the times,
granting complete credulity to her tales, a wilder riot
grrrl never drew breath. What mattered to me was whether
I had her or not. This remained variable, as Abby
also appeared, & both of us caught viable action on
the side. One night she arrived by cab to Logan
Square, in frilly dress, hair in a bun. I grabbed her
& fucked her on the floor, & that (somehow) was it—
marriage consummated. Even if Mary never really got tired of
moaning about my drug shortages— Klonopins, Ritalin.
Couldn’t love be enough? The only one who ever drove me
into delirium fits with jealousy, Mary was. She
was adept at being a little lost sheep, for anyone
(curator or not) to salvage & rescue, if I had
displeased her even for a night. The only one who ever made me
weep from pure obsessive anguish, so that so
much of my life became dramatic, I might as well have
been back with the Outlaw Playwrights. I knew now how to
evaluate compositions, the quirks of colorations, what
the Renaissance taught us about body-soul unity; more
importantly, for me, I knew what body-soul unity meant
when an individual falls in love. I cannot say,
the only one I was ever in love with; but the deepest
sense ever was, of love running in red blood through my veins,
out of my pores, into her.
Starlight
Maybe its because October nights
on the East Coast can still be sultry; it
was still reasonably early, 10:30; us three in our
usual semi-stupefied lethargy got a rush of energy,
decided to take a walk over to Fresh Grocer at 40th
& Walnut, get some grub, often in short supply at
4325. I got French bread, Mary got vegetables for stir
fry, for Abby too, & as we walked home what awaited
us was little we didn’t want. We were too
stoned to be self- consciously anything, but you
can bet we were stared at, with our symmetrical
features, sculpted cheekbones, & yet West
Philly had glitter all over it because everybody hit the
street simultaneously, we walked, levitated with
everyone, & everyone levitated with us— the house party a few nights
later was beyond levitational. Every young
painter in Philly crowded into the lived-in, yellow lit
kitchen to do whiskey shots, & drove a bunch of
points home about how the city was now working
together, firing off on all cylinders at once, even as Mary
abstained, as usual, from alcohol, which took her
nervous system & trashed it. The painters were obliging
about the poet’s participation, as laughter ricocheted into the
grassy backyard area, with its rusty fence, small
concrete plots, placing us in a city space with real green
in it, even as trees began to yellow, & as the
warm weather held. When the door to Mary’s room
shut an hour later, we took the starlight in with
us, painted & owned it.
Live Forever We had it then— not just the
embedded depth of soul love, but glamour right
on the ground, as the formation formed by
which Mary & I spent all of our nights together. Our
route— West Philly to Logan Square &
back— took two disparate locales, made them
whole, out of a sense that they were meant to
be wed, just as we were; Logan Square with
its sleek, modish urbanity, West Philly with its rusticity,
climbing ivy, plus the obvious inversion
of a well-worn media cliché against it. By New
Years Eve, 2003, there was so much gaiety in the
air, we’d pierced a hole in the obdurate,
obtrusive surface of human life, to find ourselves in a
tropical paradise— I relate to it, now, as a clear
demonstration that Heaven on Earth happens. In
Abby, we had a soul sister; in the large co-op twin
on Baltimore Ave., a safe haven; my flat in Logan
Square created a different, representatively
recent kind of stage; all were playgrounds where the
dope, pills, every thing else was shared by all,
as all of our bodies were for each other & no
one else. The profound ecstasy of that New Years was
that a bunch of artistic misfits found ways
& means of being completely at home in the
world, against constraints that needn’t have been there,
with a serene sense of what it might mean to live
forever. We were right, then & there, to be
who we were, & we knew it—
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