I stood out on the back porch, smoking. Hey. Berkeley, right? We don't smoke in the house in Berkeley. We don't even smoke at the bus stop without some asshole says, "Will you put that out?" Once I just split. No, twice I split. Always came back. Back home to Berkeley.
It was just getting on to twilight. Pink clouds stretched across the sky like diaphanous snakes which encircle the world, as we know, and bite their goddamned tails, and the windchimes jingle all sad and plaintive, and you seem to be in love but with whom?
These women. So many, I had not thought the Avenue could hold so many, so varied, so variously beautiful. Someone's smoking dope. Someone's screaming at the moon. Someone's telling his psychic healer all about it while she feels various parts of his naked body, even his cock, which rises accommodatingly under her hand (hmmm, she could put THAT to some use later on, Oh and she will...), and the windchimes go still for just a breath and then start up again, the clouds thin, the serpents dissolving into the coming evening, one of them letting the first star come blinking out of its mouth... What star is that? Or planet? I used to know. I think Jupiter, not Venus, for that Lady is the Morning Star, or is she the star of both the morning and the evening? That Lady rules, in any case. She rules my every move, all my comings and goings. Seems I'm always stalking, day and the night, searching for that Lady's emissaries, all her little girls of summer, winter girls, and the wan girls of autumn, like now... In the cafe last night one looked up from her wine and her eyes asked and why didn't I answer?
Well, Beata was home... Not that she would care. She has her boys in all the time and I must suffer the... I gotta listen to that shit, and that ain't no windchimes, honey! But I bring mine in when I know she's gone because I'm modest and private and old fashioned or something. She's this ex-Catholic got all these revenge things going, thinks it's all liberating but really it's just... Well, look, Beata is one of the most astonishingly beautiful women I've ever known and yet we just can't seem to meet in the same world. Our lovemaking was probably the worst I've ever experienced... certainly HER worst, she told me. Even so, it is convenient for us to live together. I am a slob bum hippie burnout beatnick asshole and she is a single mother with two little boys, what's more she's going to school nights and wants a guy around the house looking after the kids and herself just looking like she's not a lady alone but she's got this big, strong, slump shouldered, sunken chested, chain smoking, alcoholic burnout who will REALLY kick your ass, Mister, you come anywhere near this chick. And like that.
I wonder, though, IS that Venus? I'd be embarrassed to ask Beata. She wouldn't rest until she could answer me, and then she'd explain how I myself could go about the business of learning what star or planet that is which the dragon releases each twilight, how I could go to the library - ever hear of THAT, slum dweller? - I could even call out to the motherfucking ASTRONOMER who lives across the way, maybe even go knock on his door and just say all meek and gentle, as is my habit (my act, she says), "Hey, who IS that Lady up there right now? Yeah, that one. She dances to the windchimes. She comes out of the dragon's mouth and makes me remember some love from long ago I probably never had, or makes me think I'm in love with someone right now, only I don't know who she is. Can you tell me that, huh, can you?" Like that. So I do not consult Beata in these matters. I just make shit up. I think that's better. I like what I make up better.