Date: Sun, 20 Oct 2002 20:00:39 -0700 From: Tim Stillman <novemberhourglass@yahoo.com> Subject: This Particular Chelsea Blue Morning "This Particular Chelsea Blue Morning" by Timothy Stillman (for Mylene and Celesta--because I still remember you with such happiness, and miss you with such sadness) A golden glowing patina, the fog of the previous night dispersed. A lemony fragrance to the apartment, courtesy of Lemon Pledge. Only discreet, as though the city by the bay were something more than personal lineage, were something more than truth that would come in that rackety silence that was Fisherman's Wharf on a day like this, when there would be holiday in every second, packed deeply. Truth and what it would evoke was nothing more than the Delphi Club which had met last night and had chosen as its lateral domain nothing more than the brew of coven that had made a morning like this. Here in this loft apartment in this ramshackle building housing constant new rafts of the painterly and the poor, that was once an industrial site, now with broken plaster walls through which are on exhibit naked duct taped pipes, this skeleton of a home more than a home itself. Concrete floor, swatches and daubs of different brightly colored paint on the walls in slap set motif by other owners at one time or another. The furniture, what there was, spindly, of it; was carefully scrubbed down for Mary's guest, and mostly momentary, for this place shall not be lived in very much longer. There is the need of that. No skylight in this gabled roof, only holes that have to be plastered every now and then when the rain breaks through, said rain to be caught in buckets, this low dust moted long room where steel doors are opened by levers to get to the hall where is the portly unworking freight elevator and the concrete steps leading down beside it. The objects herein constituting life and personality were garnered from junk shops, certainly not antiques. A tiny almost not working color TV, a broken legged couch, a few painting on the walls, and always the rusty gargle gurgle of bathroom and sink pipes also much on view through walled holes. And on the mattress perched on the tiny timorous legs, this morning, then, Chelsea still asleep under the blue percale sheets. Chelsea like a sweet sliver of unapologetic life in the form of a far country naked gamin caught by most needful imagination, seen through a frost window of some centuries ago, in middlemarch, there to be read by Mary as a gay teenager by a fire, who imagines time machines and distances run so quickly, and true love winning out and lasting forever, and loneliness be no more. Chelsea slept, softly, as she did everything else, still life and still love, this romantic gangly woman who was all gentle spots and all ease movements that would bring hands up to applause in childish glee; her childhood face always mobile, always looking to those big gray eyes that still had the fog of London in them. The moment and Mary looking down at her, beside her, in that cradle warmth that was all suggestion in that tall thin body beneath the blue, like a coverlet of ocean was protecting her from the warm already sun that was softly stunning and rubbing itself against the leaded window that kept the traffic noises to a minimum. Hold still, and remember, Mary cautioned herself, her cantilevered left arm supporting her head as she studied her love from across the Atlantic. The clarity of vision that was Chelsea, the motiveless hobo, dreaming of home?, dreaming of being a rocket man?, that was in her own land someone other that fetishist inquiry, and the hair blonde that was cut short, cut like a boy's, here in the lemony sunshine which seemed to have that aroma to it. That odd feeling Mary had watching her, cut the world off and the entirety of it is two blocks long. Nothing less than a motive, nothing less than not allowing her to know what the Club said last night after Chelsea left. That and where there were only stanzas for emoting, and where sex and love had lingered two nights before when she arrived, still the smell of travel and exotic tired with gaining giggly freshness on her. The newness, new each visit, of her, of Mary's love, this spoken in the voiceless passions, in the need to have one more fine time of it before the departure, when the ways of Wicca would seem intransigent in this cusp of May morning, as though a scoop of sun had been declared a territory, a country in which to run, to have their hills soft and green sided, to know the little dilettantes in the apartment building of which they had the top floor loft, she and Chelsea, for as long as Chelsea would stay. For as long as there would be the lack of recriminations, and to cut off those thoughts, Mary, naked and small and thinly bird boned, got delicately out of bed while her rose, her love, too far and too in between slept on, and padded on the cold floor to the kitchen to make some coffee. Still life. And how there was the hectoring, she thought, as she took out the coffee filter from the Mr. Coffee machine which was on the scarred counter top next to the sink, and emptied the grounds to the waste basket, and proceeded to make a fresh pot. Here, there was little more than incense and insensitivity, as though Mary herself had known what she was getting into. As though there were something unswung about her and she pushed back her upsweep of brownish long hair from her forehead, feeling good, naked, with her friend there back in bed; someone would have to tell her, but not on a morning like this. Not when the sun had speared the fog and had dispersed it. There was too much mental reclining in this town, in the hills and the valleys that were filled with imagination, that had become more than a little desperate; even so, it was more than any other city Mary had lived in, and there had been three, previously. If she told her friend, whom she had met three years ago after a visit to the gay chat rooms international of the Internet, and with whom she had hit it off beautifully almost immediately; if she told her about the discussion held after they had left the club, then it would have to come as the very pattern of the city, the geometric recall that was nothing less than turns around. That was where the cable car tracks were and rushing to the center and grabbing the central rail, which would prove nothing more than everything was safe, than there was nothing left in the world, at least this hemisphere of it, as far as Mary was concerned, than safety. Everything was fixed, from the panhandler down on the street, "can't we see Haight Asbury" again?, this, always among the first questions, from Chelsea. which of course was itself a sixties name and word, though Chelsea had not been born until 1972. The golden flowers of Frisco had wilted long ago, her ten year older friend thought, as the coffee pot dripped its golden liquid down to the container. Mary stood flat footed and stretched her arms to the ceiling and watched motes fly about her in sun and shadow caught, and she, the great Wagnerian composer, ready to bring the baton down, ready to begin. She thought about the freedom of being a gay woman in this town that was noted for its tolerance, for the abode it provided with supposedly no questions asked, but the friendliness had belayed the bow in itself, that eventual rise that was the hillock of so many of the streets of this town, the numbers running backward it seemed, with all those buildings, businesses, apartment houses, houses painted in bright red and gold and green cartoon colors. Nothing spiced but those bodegas and the delis and the restaurants and the cafes, from which came the smells of tantalizing freedom food and drink, holiday mirth that was the stillness of phony affluence that pretended for a golden stranger from a dead and old and dying even still country to experience to freshness of a life started over. This from Mary's viewpoint at least, concerning herself, that was nothing coverlet and nothing overt for her friend, just the phone call last night, after they had gotten back from the club, after Chelsea had fallen asleep, some time after they had smoked some weed and sipped some wine and had made love in the divan with its torn ugly green covering and always precarious left leg. Such an adventure having sex on that divan, in front of the long large window with the city stretched out for all to see before them, looking in, and looking out. The call had that vandalized, expected brutal quietness about it, that Mary sitting on the kitchen floor, with the living room phone pulled in there, for that was as far as the cord would reach, Baby Bell powder blue phone, see, there, everything normal, everything fine and safe, as safe as houses, as her friend would say. And Mary not wanting to appear stupid, though knowing what the phrase meant, not knowing why the words were used to invoke that feeling, that image, had listened, and it felt as though her ear had been boxed in by the voice which was low and slow and deliberate, as though something were taking place here that had taken place here and over the world all the time and there was nothing less to do about it that to listen. But it hadn't happened to her friend before, it had not happened to anyone other than the few who had used Mary without knowing. Who had dabbled into a fetishistic wake that was tied at the bottom of the bay here and there, if not literally , then in the mind of Mary and the two others who were the attack machines with the gears going in their minds, with the stripped gears that were ratcheting into a certain doom laden saga that had only to do with this town that Mary saw as becoming more and more dilapidated and soggy hilled and filled with a kind of green tinctured tension that was only the great stretching way of it. The way the days had settled like warm suggestions over this spring and the summer to come, but the nights briny and cold smelling and nothing more than eventual departure when an airplane was supposed to have taken her friend back to her home again. The notches and the notices in the flowery dirty little Newport row of where friends live and where it is morning and the day is meant to reel out unharmed and successful to the finest link, because squinted eyes always searched in big sun country sky, with the blue unhampered all around it , as the city went on its way with what it was supposed to be after all, and it had nothing to do with balance, even Goth balance. It was only itself the same. Two days ago, Mary had met her friend at the airport, and in that great cavern of travelers arrived and ready to depart, all those ghostly panes of glass that are their eyes and the eyes of those seeing their friend or relative off or welcome home and kiss. Women after all, even straight women are so allowed in public places, here in California at least for God's sake, and they had embraced, Mary and Chelsea, and there was not a ripple in the world now. Not for Mary anyway. She had never dared asked Chelsea about her own sex life, and though Mary knew that was a cowardly thing on her part, because of course Chelsea had one and had referred to it obliquely in e mail. Even so, Mary had let it alone, as with a previous girl friend, sadly, all platonic. The thing of it was that there was trembling in Mary's heart no more. At that point, in that air conditioned airport, with luggage circling round indolently on the carousel. All safe now, as Mary had been counting the weeks since Chelsea had told her she was coming, "have a place for me?," and after it had all happened, after Chelsea's flight had left for home, without Chelsea on it, after all had been stowed away and there was the numb memory of forgetting which would never be clear again. That would dampen even this city, because though she liked to think Chelsea was special, she was not, and Mary could live out her entire life in this city, move from this apartment, and never replicate her friend again, avoid all the places they had been, as though running from the ghost. As though Chelsea's tony London accent were somehow trapped in these very buildings themselves, these very sidewalks, as if Mary went back to the places they had been, there was this voice to come out of Mary's own head, something insensate, something that was lack of freedom and was a prison for her own mind. Mary had been serving herself coffee, was up to three cups so far, while she thought these things, idly scratching her back, while she went to the divan where they had made love the night before, in a curiously unsexual, curiously chaste way-- Mary caught inside herself. Chelsea in herself. They barely recognized each other then. They had been like children. Only that had made it seem bearable. Mary now sat there with her legs spread out, her slightly chaffed pussy feeling the rich hum of cool air coming in the window, which she had now upraised, feeling deliciously decadent, as though there were certain avenues that they could explore today in the most crooked legs of the city, on this blue bay morning, when the seasons were still aborning and there was nothing to do but to lazily look to her left and see Chelsea sleeping there. Seeing the innocence that had a kind of shattering eye brittleness to it, as did her words, the words that seemed to somehow be bitten off at the end, that appeared to somehow obtain little fuselages that were always recurring, that always seemed to mean more than they really did. And Mary sipped her coffee, cream and lots of sugar, and considered the large square which was her window's painting of the city, and she tried not to remember the phone conversation last night, or rather, early this morning, something dim about it, as though the shadowy words and the shadowy voice had conspired to push her to an eventual fall away from her friend. Who was only such a short distance away, the decision though, had been set before the voice said the words out loud. Hearing them this time again made everything seem kind of ghostly, as it had been at the meeting earlier last night, just some gay girls getting together for a coffee clatch so it appeared. Chelsea had been interested in the Goth movement in her own country, which to Mary's mind, was a culture beset with snobbish inclement acting and speaking and dressing and careless people who seemed to think ancient brittle unreliable history was everything. That somehow it, this snotty gossip, made them part of immortality, and therefore they did not have to have anything approaching personality other than a kind of remote unfestive churlishness that was a spiral downward into rocky terrain that they tried for all their lives to make their own. As if that were something to want obtained. But it never could be. It belonged intransigently to what never was, that helped make them just a bit of colorless inhuman humanity. Sock puppets to be taken soon and quickly by the winds of change, as long as the wind was blue blooded and "ra-ther" enough. But Mary had tried to think that Chelsea was different, different from the other girl from there. She hated to say the word, name the country, say the curse word, "England" or the clever eyed sound "Great Britain"--what the hell was so great about a little dilwad island in the Atlantic?; an island that once dominated by sheer brute force, the rest of the world, before finally and deservedly so, being knocked back on, as they say, its pins? And those memories in the realm of Mary brought back such shivery daggers of pain to her. But Mary for all her smarts, for all her posh girls school teaching position could be so incredibly naive; could be so incredibly gauche, and sticking the wrong words out there in that old provincial furnitured living room last night, with Chelsea, trying to make herself so continental, when what she was really was a girl trying to live before her time, trying to pretend that she was deservedly older, that she had learned something from the years, and that she was a child again at one and the same time Chelsea had embarrassed Mary so much last night, Chelsea drunk on wine and weed, sounding like an E.M. Forster novel, so gay, so spooked with an attention for autumn right and proper detail on the voyages of the secretive life painted in code almost, that bored the girls at the clatch witless. Something naughty said, but spoken with a clarity as if the Ivorys were making a movie of her words, and endemic through her most fertile and smiley button imagination of what would these long dead writers say today, as Chelsea nattered on, so superior, glass dripping wine, unnoticed by her: "Words are life; fools who dare call themselves teachers are killing the history between the pages; they are MURDERERS," and she trying to show everyone there she is a teacher and much more than that, A READER; a reader who was current and who had an unlocking device of unerring rightness of knowledge. She spoke like this, with which to stir the old dead books that other teachers, professors, mind you, couldn't even begin to bring the LIFE to, and she on her mission of doing just that. And, the room of gay girls bidding goodbye in the middle of their yawns, she and Chelsea had continued the medicinal alcohol course. when they had gotten back to Mary's apartment. No. Flat. Never say apartment. Mary had known she would get that late phone call, because Mary knew there was nothing to do but go through with it, and if Wicca and the Goth movement were ever to be joined, then there had to be something to the moth and flame theory. That little flickering nicety that came at the edge of her sisters' own brittleness, which unlike Chelsea's, happened to be real; happened to be something that was layered downward to something of degrees that took the city and its wine fielded environs into texture. Which said this is where the differences are, this is where the killing would have started back who knows when? and it doesn't matter who you pray to, Earth Goddess, Moon Mother, carve them up, mix them like mix and match cards, you still have snakes and ladders and someone has to go up the ladders and someone has to stay on the ground to be snake bitten. This, and freedom, and Chelsea moaned in her sleep as Mary looked at her. Mary longed to go to her, to kiss her on those soft little reddish lips, to wake her up and to see Chelsea awake to her and those lovely foreign exotic arms, as though their arms were made of finer material than American ones. Though they were just arms after all, and bony at that. They would extend round Mary's shoulder, their clarion call of the wonderful climactic warm festive feeling for both. That they would naked together and one or the other or both would pull down the blue sheet, and they would lie beside each other and would touch and kiss the other's breasts, and entwine legs, and tongue devour vaginas. And later, dressing casually, they would have their morning brioche at a cafe down the street, and then yes then we shall see Haight Asbury, but you will be disappointed with it, not when you are with me, love, and let's make love now, and I feel like a cat this morning, in this wrongly catless apartment, stretching to all my potential in that golden harvest of sunshine. And they would make love yet again; children of the nights when both had been indeed children and resolutely alone, needing no one else. And when they would make love again, in order that it not be love or sex at all, Mary would once more, trap her conscience and send it down the black mine in the center of her brain. She finished her coffee, but the mug was still warm and she rubbed it on her left cheek and thought of balance, and of why she had to do the scut work. She thought of what was the purpose of this sacrifice was. It had no purpose really. It was, chilly like the country from which Chelsea had come and to which she thought she would be late returning at week's end. But, having possession was something unbearable, something so lugubrious, that there was no end in sight for it, though the end was very much in sight. And there would be a wrinkleless debris that would have to be called to freeze Chelsea's ghost, which somewhere on point of recounting, that had come from its most diverse, most obvious glanded goal into something still more or less that had to do with, quite simply, betrayal. Mary remembered Tennessee William's injunction that we must always distrust each other, for it is our only defense against betrayal. Mary had seen it last night at Willie's apartment; Chelsea being the youngest one there, all of 28, and the girls, girls, right, thirties and forties, all of them, had never taken their eyes far from Chelsea's appearance. >From her gaudy oddly exotic appearance, from her just being there at all; there in her simple white shirt and black jeans and tennies wardrobe, but being elegant in them regardless. Her neck, tall and thin, and her face so fresh and unlined, not even needing make up yet. Her eyes bursting with a radiance of life, but the others, including Mary knew that life is where it ends; not in a morbid way, but the way night follows, so we can stop squinting at the sun. So, we can have a dark cool time when we don't have to pinch our vision back and ruin our sinus cavities looking up at the sun, where we don't stand a chance. Chelsea had history she did not know. There were connective formations that were like clouds on the mountains. There was nothing but a dentifrice that was stuck between those rows of gleaming white teeth; not for her, the renowned bad teeth of England. And if f there were teeth mark on the city below that seemed now to be turning to molten gold beneath the conductive conductor electric sun that someone had switched on far too brightly for this early in the morning, it had to do with making her British Friend, into something like morning forever. Not that death is love; not that killing is something beautiful; leave that to the holy roller Christers, Mary thought; let them play mind games with themselves and each other. It was just that something had happened to a world that had grown flaccid with need that has given up. That had grown flaccid with broken promises and broken trusts, where people stole hearts they didn't want, and time they didn't need or use. Where there was nothing more than a place that was globeless. That seemed like a water goblet filled to overflowing and it meant absolutely nothing. Nothing close or caring or truly profound. It had to do with coupling and it had to do with making it mature and immature and less than even that. Making it get easier each time. Mary discerned now the ticking of the morning, heard the little mouse like sounds in the apartments--sorry--flats--below her; the getting up, the making their way through the day that was another work day for them. But for Mary and Chelsea a day of play; a day of ocean side and scanning the sky for sea gulls and imagining. England has spread here, Mary thought, balancing in her, she admitted, her somewhat schizoid feelings toward it, and toward Chelsea. Mary thought, looking at the Brit girl, how she would do it. And how she would get away with it; all that coldness peeking out there in Chelsea, (even the girl's clit had seemed cold to Mary's tongue) lying over there in that tender and warm and fetching fancy body that she could walk to and awaken and get wrapped up in. In a ll that lovely pink, and all those giddy apertures where tongues and fingers and dildos could ride the crests of sunspent waves. Let's do that, Chelsea, Mary wanted to say, let's just stay here and vegetate, let's just stay here and you can retrain me on how to be young and cold and funny and bright as a new copper penny. So I won't have to dream about you having bleached boiled eggs for eyes, eyes that seem to make a mockery of the sun. Eyes that seem to smile at me and take in all of me as you ministrate to my body, eyes that might not lie, eyes that reflect back absolutely nothing. And there is the center of our problem. Mary thought, how do I differ from you? There is the epic tone of our poem, and wherever we should leave beyond that in our crawling race to the sea, to the sea, is where I cannot go and where you cannot either, Chelsea, because it's too simple and it's too monstrous, too inhuman, at the same time. The pointed piney wood feel of the city before me, Mary mused, the residential street and if I strain hard enough the sound of cars starting and taking off. The imaginations of bikes being gotten onto and pedaled into work in this health conscious eco-conscious living-conscious city. Let us go down to the cafe two blocks away and sit at one of their rickety tables small oval and the wrought pattern wicker chairs, outside next to the sidewalk, like in faux Paris, done up Frisco style. And I will tell you, my love, be my love, won't you?, that the people passing are not on holiday. That they have more than you have in your country of lonely cliffs and refused hearts and angels with their blunt noses and their tariffs that include an ability to move away instantly from someone who cared too much, move away without a single restraint on their souls than whatever turned up the next morning. Or something always belly flopped in order that their own domicile not to have ended, but to have changed personable furniture a bit, and not to worry about it a bit, my love. And the person left for other times, who cares? Oh, Mary thought, if that other girl had not hurt me so, and thought me amusing on top of it. Goddam her. See what bother all of that kind of thing causes? See how worlds end in such a way? Not just a person, but entire worlds within worlds. A splash of a cruel rock in the center of a pond. The circles never stop forming. I love you, Chelsea, Mary said, perhaps aloud. I love you and don't want you to become a cartoon of yourself. I will wait for tonight to end you and me. I will wait until we are out walking somewhere, like we walked to my apartment from the bus stop, each of us loaded down with your luggage and we laughed and talked and were like Laverne and Shirley on the old TV series at the beginning of each episode. We will do that again tonight; only we will not be loaded down with luggage, though the street's hills will still be so terribly difficult to climb and I will tell you nothing of the ensuing events that will not be real at all, not when you think about it, and what the human mind and spirit all about. And I shall not voice distinction, or astral reasons for this, or the fact the planets will be lining up soon like billiard balls in a cosmic pool game hustle that will literally usher in the Age of Aquarius, your season, Chelsea; the season when you had your mental and imaginative youth, the season of "Hair" and "Futz" and "Joe" and all the other counterculture pictures of the rerun art cinema you love so much over there. And here too. We will go to our copy of that theater, tonight, and I will kiss your cold lips with my warm ones, one last time. And after the movie is over, you filled with the past you think you know so well, I will ease you down to the quiet ascending easeful ground. I will of course run for help. But, of course, too late for you. For it is not necessary to merge the pure good luck and good karma with the bad, with a sort of evil that blocks out the sun, when there is supposed to be no sun at night. When I wish beyond wishes, safe as houses, that I could turn to you in the cinema this evening. And you would take your eyes off the screen and be looking, really and truly looking at me, not appraising me like a china breakfast set you might or might not want, which you've begun to do more and more lately. And I stupid enough to classify that, at my weak moments, as love, and there would be an honesty, a loyalty in your eyes in that flickering dimness. That I could climb into those eyes and I could wander about in them and I could hear you talk later on about "The Strawberry Statement," a book that Mary had sent her a few years before, about civil collegiate unrest in the sixties, that Chelsea, born far too late for the sixties, had gone on and on raving about. And in that one true moment, Mary thought, you and I will honestly understand it, all about it. And everything else. Isn't that what love is supposed to be? We will see so clearly the good and the bad, the truth and the lies, and it will not just be another attempt at affectation, and the pieces of it that are you now will then be gone. And you will lay down your knives sharp hideously curved, in it. We could both go back there, to the 60's, where there truly would be substance. Not all selfish and hype and everybody just making their way the best they can like always. And I would give you love beads outside the theatre with its rainbowy orangy light and you would be thrilled and say where ever did you get them? and we would go on our way and perhaps the knife in my coat pocket, for it still gets cold here at night my love, will be your ticket to nothing. Your ticket to that great and spellbinding feat of legerdemain that comes at the end and you rush off not to witches good or evil, not to unicorns that have the scent of flower about them, but only into the hypocritical and festering disease that it is to want to be a human being. Mary thinking how I wish to have that disease as well. And to want, in spite of absolutely everything, to wake up again the next morning. With you. Oh god, with you. But someone has to pave the way. Someone has to go forward into it and make it less scary for when I get there. Someone has to die, because as Jean Genet put it, I think I am falling in love with this boy, if that is so, I shall have to kill him. Simple as that. Passionless passion, Chelsea, the girlhood that hangs on for you; the simplistic needs and prophecies and desires and fulfillings and what you think you and others still want. What you do to ingratiate others whom you irrigate for a while and then move on, and think no more about it, like a careless willful child who misplaces her toys and misses them a moment or two, maybe even searches for them a bit. But here comes Dad and he's got a new toy for me, and then the instant forgetting. Perhaps that was what it was, that sad irony that the games of being children, the horribly lethal games of childhood. Of being a child, the parts we forget when we grow up and try to constantly repaint the pain with the old dried water colors. Mistaking it for love and charity and knowledge and common sense. When it is just a primal needing gnawing want. That place back there where emotions and thoughts were at our skins and brains all the time. We were absolutely feverish with them, and we had nothing to do with them, they were rather visited on us. They inhabited us, and we were just carrier pigeons marveling at our own intrinsic ability to fly high into the sky and dream great and tall thoughts. It was electricity moving through us and then we grow up and we trade on it until we finally erase ourselves from the world while we are still there. It's you Chelsea, you with your history of country, that is part true, part lie, of tradition of slow and glacial moving of time; those thousands of years old villages of yours, but you and me--all of us--we barely take a breath before we are off on some new adventure, on some new lark. Mary was too young to have been much aware of the sixties either. Oddly her touchstone to that time had been, of all things, the movie of "Fritz the Cat." She had tried to watch that movie, with Chelsea, but Chelsea had only made it through ten minutes or so before she angrily got up and said she wanted to go out to get some pizza. It had made Mary angry, as though she had been personally attacked. Mary had so ridiculously wanted to hurt her back. She hadn't been a petty child or woman, but she was caught in pettiness at that moment. And Chelsea, getting on her nerves, made her pettier still as their time together went on. Mary was losing perspective which meant she was gaining perspective. It was all falling away from her. Or she was falling away from it. Anyway, which ever it was, both really, tonight they would travel to Haight Asbury and they would stand on the corner, under the street sign, and Chelsea would snap Mary's picture and Mary would snap Chelsea's, here in this the sacred place, the shrine. And she would exact revenge for Fritz the Cat. Silly as that. It was the base work. And the girls wanted her to do this. Expected her to do it. But Fritz had wormed his way into this. And had decided her for good and all. "The transfer has to occur in a way that make it non conflictual," a pedantic, boorish, tiresome psychologist in bliss with his own bearded importance said on TV recently, concerning the taking of, at gun point, and the giving back of Elian Gonzalez to his father, and that is an impossibility no matter how many twenty dollar words such men use. Mary looked over at her friend on the last day of her life, so far from home, so far from everything and everyone. In my clutches, then, Mary thought. And giggled. Somehow in British. The weather report said foggy tonight, and Mary thought it would not be a pea souper like back home, but good enough, and proper enough since Chelsea is only a carbon copy of the children she grew up with. Like all of us, the children and adults she now has her days with; adults young enough to think they remember childhood, old enough to have gotten it wrong. So then, soon, fate: On the corner of Haight Asbury where the love children in her British friend's mind still grow; those selfish greedy suspicious love children who hid from the world with drugs and liquor and whatever sex with whatever gender and however the numeral configuration-- My, what a head case, Mary thought, am I. Chelsea has thus infected me. Poetic justice bites back. So, how do you like that Mr. Psychologist; am I taking myself apart enough for you here? Chelsea wanted to experience what they supposedly did, and, most horribly, most ironically, she would, for at the end of "Gimme Shelter" there is a brutal murder, just another happenin' baby!, crowd gutturally cheering, rock, slaughter, what was the difference? Just another light and sound show, the dead wake up, don't wake up, who cares?, and the Stones barely stop to retune, to regear, to suggest there might be something foul at the center of it. Some noxious flower that had been blooming blackly and betrayingly for such a long time, and it was better to rush to squeamy adult hood and become podgy, as Chelsea would term it, get a marriage, get kids, forget forget. I won't let you forget, Mary said, aloud, as Chelsea stirred in the still warm bed that had once, and nothing ever could change that, erase that, contained Mary with her, I will put love beads and flowers on you. And I will be sad for you. Because someone somewhere has to finally be sad for somebody. Consider it karma under a Wicca moon. I've done it before, not with passion, not with longing or regret, not with anything I've pretended I have had with you. Conjuring up fake or not so fake childhood emotions and happinesses and viewpoints and giggles. Leading you down the garden path to the city fog and what leads out of it and into it. Mary rose and walked to Chelsea, to touch her ivory cold white skin. To wake her up. Thinking: I will sing softly, in my best Joan Baez voice, as I kneel over you, and the day will not follow the night, of all the young men gone to graveyards everyone. And I truly will mourn. She touched Chelsea to the day. How alive she felt.. Chelsea opened her eyes--be ten again, oh please--looked at Mary, and smiled, fully, completely, so it seemed. But Mary was not wrong--that was where they tricked you, playing on your compassion and pity, when they had none of their own. And Chelsea, looking just like a Sunday morning, rubbing her eyes and saying "good morning," so perky and bright and Mary, still knowing how, smiled at her, and kissed her friend's lips tenderly. Their lips adhered momentarily before both women pulled away. Mary, thinking, damn it, if Chelsea had just not made a mockery of "Fritz the Cat," I would not do this thing; I would at least let someone else take care of it. But, sigh, what the hell, nothing to do, but keep on truckin'.