Let's Begin Here

 

Let’s begin here, in Henry and Lucia’s bedroom, they’re feeling each other up, experimenting with Doctor Vishnu's prescribed Tantric sex.

Tantric sex, noncoital contact work exercised to achieve mindfulness, breath-work, prolonged eye contact, deep emersion. The goal of Tantric sex is to facilitate the transmission of sexual energy between two willing participants to heal oneself by dissolving negative personality traits such as— 

• dishonesty
• disloyalty
• unkindness
• meanness
• rudeness
• disrespectfulness
• impatience
• greediness
• abrasiveness
• pessimism
• cruelty
• unmercifulness
• narcissism
• obnoxiousness
• maliciousness
• pettiness

A snake pit of isms and nesses, fat words, plenty to go around.

Henry and Lucia took the oath when it came to disloyalty, disrespectfulness, and pessimism.

They were Disrespectful and disloyal, casting a cool eye towards social institutions, or patterns of beliefs and behaviors focused on meeting social needs, such as government, education, family, healthcare, religion, and the economy.

Pessimistic about the future.

It’s mid-morning in Key West. The couple’s in the backyard, tripping the cosmic highway, waist-deep in a hot tub, drinking Cuban beer mixed with Clamato. Lucia reminds Henry, 

darling, we have a meeting at the Center for a Stateless Society at three. 

Yeah, let’s eat,

si muñeca.

The freak couple’s raven locks bluster unscrupulously. Later,  at the mall, they park and walk to Goldman's Deli.

Sears Town Shopping Center isn’t much, just a strip mall, but, Conches love the retro, single-story, blushing color mall because it's filled with stores they love— Taco Bell, Radio Shack, Orange Julius, Red Owl, Banana Republic, and of course Sears & Roebuck.

The main draw for Henry and Lucia is Goldmans Deli, the only authentic deli in the Keys, a reproduction of a Brooklyn Deli. 

Inside, at a table, they stare at the condiment tray and a half-gallon stainless steel bucket of Kosher pickles. 

The owner, Pinkus Goldman, comes to their table. He has a white shirt on, open at the collar, an apron, and is bald. He greets the couple,

good to see yous people, how bout the Libertarian meeting, ya goin? 

How’d ya know Pinka? 

I’m a member, 

Yeah, we’re goin. 

Better eat then, whataya have? Henry orders,

let’s see? How bout a corn beef sandwich, lean, a bowl of matzo ball soup, noodle kugel, cole slaw, and ah, a malted egg soda. 

The couple's peckish,  they eat off of each other's plates. 

When they're full they pay Pinky’s wife, Golden Goldman. She's smiling, sitting cross-legged behind the cashier's station.

The next stop is The People for a Stateless Society in the Anchors Away Club.

They walks up the fire steps to the third floor where they're greeted by Edgar Shankman at room thirty— a champion of the Libertarian cause who’s happy to see them saying, 

welcome Libertarians. 

Inside there’s a circular row of folding chairs facing inwards. The room feels like a third-floor living room— ten people have shown, later, every seat is taken. The group is telling jokes and laughing. 

Edgar Shankman is chair, he opens the meeting saying,

hello, people, welcome to the monthly Libertarian free for all meeting. Please, only one person can speak at a time. The meeting is over when there’s nothing left to say.

A middle-aged white woman, who looks like a librarian speaks first.

Libertarianism is an express view of political philosophy. We value individual freedom and we believe this justifies strong protections for individual freedom. We believe in the rights of others. And most obviously, people should refrain from violating the rights of others. Libertarians strongly endorse, drug decriminalization, freedom of sexual choice, and oppose most military interventions.  

Edgar Shankman says, 

amen sister, you said a mouthful.

Lucia whispers in Henry’s ear, 

the señora mayor, she’s smart, but her share was memorized, espontáneo is better. Pinkus Goldman speaks up,

 

I’m a Jew and a Libertarian, but a Libertarian first. I need what we have here, the unity of purpose and support you all give me, it's grounding and it gives me hope. 

Lucia jumps in,

I'm from Cuba so I adore freedom. It's no fun living in Cuba, it's a derelict place. Gracias a Dios, Henry got me out. Cubanos are afraid to talk about Libertarianism, but Gringos are free to say what they want, gracias a Dios.

Attendees nod their heads and some say Amen. Henry, who’s uncomfortable with the heady, ethereal shares says, 

Enough with the civics and staged speeches, political parleys engender hesitancy and consternation. We can talk ourselves blue, but a single idiom that brings peace is better than a thousand words.

There are a few minutes of silence—  the minutes hover on the ceiling, longer than usual.

Edgar Shankman jumps in saying, 

Fellow Libertarians, we have found the end, or it has found us. We’ll close the meeting in the usual way, with some selected  Libertarian adages. 

Communities don't have rights. Only individuals in the community have rights.

The libertarian worship of individual freedom, and contempt for social convention, comes easiest to people who have never really had to grow up.

Then Shankman calls it day saying, 

drinks at the Moon Dog Cafe.

Henry and Lucia skip the after-party, riding home on their Vespa. Their hungry so they order a Mediterranean Pizza and boiled artichokes spritzed with Key Lime butter. 

They camp on the living room sofa with the Chis. The doorbell rings, its the delivery guy, Fritz, from Italian Kitchens who says, 

the Lucowskis, local literatus. The za’s sprinkled with bush, you'll love it.

great— Henry pays Fritz, taking the goods from Fritz, placing the square pizza box and cardboard buckets of artichokes on the sofa table in front of the TV. Lucia brings a pitcher of rum cocas and a couple of cocktail glasses.

The moony couple eats with their hands—  surrendering to the run the wet artichokes drip.  

Henry picks up the remote, turns on the TV, and says, 

the more pizza I eat the higher I get. Is there a concert on? 

They have cable TV, the premium package. He presses the CH button on the remote, landing on the opening scene of the film— Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. 

Virginia Woolf was a British writer who pioneered stream of consciousness writing and the exhaustive study of a character’s emotions and psycho-motives. Dame Woolf suffered from psychosis and eventually commented suicide. 

Unlike the central characters in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, George and Martha, played brilliantly by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Virginia Woolf had a happy and loving marriage to Leonard Woolf. 

Lucia brings in another pitcher of rum cocos.

No one knows how it happened, but, George and Martha got their names from the seventeenth century Washingtons and lived on the campus of a New Carthage, Massachusetts college. 

George is a history professor and Martha thinks he is a failure, he has been teaching college in New Carthage for years and still wasn’t a dean. 

Martha would often remind George of his failures, alone or in front of others. Mostly, George’s career failure and another topic, their dead son. 

As the film opens the couple is already half in the bag, waiting at home for Nick and Honey, played by George Segal and Sandy Dennis, to show for a drink. 

Nick is a new science professor at the college. The young couple’s naivety and niceness are in contrast to George and Martha’s jaded spitefulness. 

The first act is Fun And Games. Nick and Honey show at George and Martha's house, walking unknowingly onto the battlefield. 

As they sit on the sofa,  the older couple is pushing drinks on them.

George and Martha use Honey and Nick as pawns, transforming their guests into an audience to witness humiliation, whipping the green-eyed monster as they express their own sides of their mutual story. 

Eventually, Martha comes on to Nick and the two go upstairs to have sex. Nick was very loaded and he wanted to impress Martha because her father was president of the university. 

Unfortunately, he couldn't get it up for Martha and self-loathing Martha really lets him have it from then on.   

While the two were upstairs trying to get it on, George was alone with Honey who is unaware that her husband is upstairs with Martha, thinking he just went upstairs to take a catnap. When George tells her what is really going on, Honey who has had too much to drink throws up all over the sofa.

When Nick comes downstairs the young couple goes home, mentally beat and wondering what the fuck happened? 

In the last scene, The Exorcism,  George and Martha are sitting alone at home and they begin talking about their dead son. Well, it turns out he isn’t dead, he is just an illusion the couple uses as part of their twisted love game.

George announces he is killing talk of their dead son and they will have to get along by simply loving each other without the illusion. 

In life, things tend to evaporate— the mystical couple, George and Martha, are falling apart again, back in the pits slugging it out.

Lucia cries when the short film is over saying to Henry, 

it’s the film, it's muy depresiva. It’s about real-life maybe, we’ll forget it in the morning,  I'm going to bed querido, I love you.

Bob Ross, Pure Positivity

 

Tom Robbins can let fly with the devil may care phrase with the best of em.  Shit like— the Grand Canyon as the Canyon of Vaginas. Or, traveling on Thanksgiving day in his Dodge wagon he calls the cosmic turkey.

Henry, who has writer’s block, is reading Robbin's book Wild Ducks Flying Backwards to trigger his poetic mind.

Writing on his travels in Nevada Tom says, 

If something is so hazardous and destructive and ugly and spooky that we don’t know what to do with it, we stick it in Nevada. The state is blotched with danger areas immense— guarded, off-limits, concealing every imaginable kind of high-tech poison, as well as various weapons systems that sup on or excrete those poisons. In Nevada, a fluffy little cloud can suddenly exterminate a whole flock of sheep. And Nevada is the place the Bomb calls home. 

We dump on Nevada because Nevada seems so useless and empty because it seems that there is less there than the there that Gertrude Stein couldn’t find in Oakland. Of course, any couch turnip who’s caught The Wonderful World of Disney knows that the desert is teeming with life. 

Let’s bury Tom for a moment. 

Henry pours a drink and looks out the window at his Key West neighborhood, thinking nothing. He picks up an underground paper with a real hip shot of Lenny Bruce on the cover.

Yeah, Lenny was funny at times, the bit, I Can’t Cum, was a masterpiece. He was persecuted, right, sure, physically and spiritually, but, and this a deadly but, he was obsessed with bad voodoo, bad mathematics. 

Lucia, Henry’s drop-dead sexy Cubano wife walks into his study  bitching,

I’m tired of your drinking and partying,

what? We’ve been partying non-stop since we met at The Gato Bar in Havana a decade ago.

You're worse than me Henry. 

who’s the judge? 

Me, 

you, you’re the judge? 

Yes, I am, and you ignore me too, chicas need attention you know. 

I’m writing a bit on the death of Lenny Bruce for the German magazine SYBILLE. Lenny’s story, the story of his life, not his death. 

Are you suffering, Henry? 

No, but junks suffer, once they take the shit they spend every waking hour looking for the next fix. Lenny functioned on junk though, he did his comedy bits in the clubs and fought the speech dicks and legal bullies tooth and claw in every courtroom in America. It destroyed him, the poor fucker was shot to pieces in the end— dead of an overdose in his Hollywood Hills home, forty and looking like he’d lived a century. 

What about us, Henry? What’s in it for us? 

Everything’s in it for us, the world’s at our feet. Let me wrap things up and we’ll take the Chis to Dog Beach. 

Lucia goes to the bedroom, slipping into her thong swimsuit and a bulky Oxford shirt. Henry follows in a few, putting on cut-offs and a T ripped at the collar. Then she braids and oils his waist-length hair. 

In no time the couple and the Chihuahuas, Che, and Mia are in their 73 Malibu cruising to Dog Beach, feeling relieved, leaving the what-ifs and junk speak on the further side to evaporate.

They park and get out of the car. Lucia Lugs her large Gucci bag and the Chis follow. 

At the entrance to Dog Beach, a free beach, they're met by Lazy Carlos, who has a bamboo hut of the same name with rental umbrellas, beach chairs, and seaside sundries for sale. 

Carlos is overjoyed to see the couple, greeting them like old friends saying,

I’ve got some killer weed for ya, Thai stick, two tokes, and your gone. 

Henry helps Carlos with the beach chairs and umbrellas, which they carry to the couple's favorite spot, between two palms. 

Settled in their chairs they light up, the Thai stick smothers them, swallowing the couple in a mighty haar.  

Fifty meters out to sea, a series of glares flash off the windows of a fishing boat run aground, catching the couple's eye. The rusted vessel has been in the same place for the last year and looks forgotten.

The Chihuahuas run in the sand, nipping at each other’s heels— mimicking the livestock herding behavior they were originally bred for in Mexico.

Hot, the dogs run into the water for a swim. They’re natural swimmers, swimming instinctually. 

Mia begins to struggle as she’s snatched in a cross current. Che swims towards her to help and is caught in the same current. 

Out of nowhere, Lazy Carlos bulldozes through the waves, unfettered by the currents, seizing hold of the shaking pups with one arm, floating till he can stand then walking in the sand to Henry and Lucia saying,

Jesus, your pups almost drowned, they’re like kids, you gotta watch em. 

Lucia begins to cry and wraps her babies in a large beach towel, Henry’s grateful, saying to Carlos, 

I feel awful, we owe you.

Howza bout a case of Bucanero Beer? 

You got it, we'll ring The Tipsy Rooster. 

Henry and Lucia walk to their Chevy Malibu and the Chis follow. He says to her, 

Luckily, our baby's memory is short.

Shut up Henry, they almost drowned, and your sermonizing like the nerd you are. I hate you sometimes. 

The ride home is heavy with human vibes— Henry's and Lucia's. The Chis stick their heads out of the half-opened windows and bark at the world as it floats by.

Henry accidentally turns on the car radio with his knee as he’s reaching for something on the dash. Fresh Out, played by Kingfish Ingram and Buddy Guy, whales through the speakers. The music lifted him into a unmaped space. 

At home, they order Chinese food from Po Po Hot Pot and sit in front of the living room TV watching Bob Ross The Joy of Painting on NPR. Lucia giggles with enjoyment saying, 

Oh, his paintings are nothing especial, but I love his Afro— his voice is maravilloso, so peaceful, it draws you in, he makes me feel good. 

You got that right babe, Bob Ross is the ultimate calming presence.

As they watch Bob communicate with his TV audience he lays out gobs of paint in a semi-circle on his palette, each a different color— Alizarin Crimson, Van Dyke Brown, Yellow Ochre, white, black. 

When it came time for the first strokes of paint on the canvas— Bob gently brushes some bright orange figure-eight marks to represent the sun on the horizon. 

You just can’t help but watch Bob as he waves his paintbrush like a wand creating delicate pine trees and majestic mountains. 

The soft scratching sound of his brush hitting the canvas and his gentle voice, that's just a smidgen louder than a whisper, narrates each step of the painting process as he encourages viewers every chance he has. 

In every episode, Bob explained his art not merely as a way of layering paint, but also as a way of capturing the eternal beauty of the world and living free regardless of the challenges of life. 

As he filled his canvas with light color he say things like, 

this piece of canvass is your world and on here you can do anything that your heart desires. 

When he painted a cloud, he might say, 

a cloud is one of the freest things in nature. 

Or, 

clouds sort of float around and have a good time.

And when he’d turn his painter’s knife on its edge and carved out a crisp, snow-capped mountain, he sometimes point to one side and say, 

this is where the little mountain goat lives, right up here. He needs a place to call home, too, just like the rest of us. 

Bob Ross was a force of pure positivity in a world without a lot of it. By the end of the eighties, his show Joy of Painting had eighty million worldwide viewers and received two hundred letters every day. 

It’s hard to nail down the draw Bob had on people in TV Land, but before Joy of Painting is over in the Lucowski bungalow, Henry, Lucia, and the Chis are sound asleep on the living room sofa.

Paradise Bites

 

Kissing is a great invention. On the list of inventions, it ranks higher than the microwave oven and hula hoop. 

Tradition says that kissing was invented by medieval nights for the purpose of determining whether their wives had been hitting the mead. 

Kissing transcends class and financial status and is a cheap way for two, three, or however many people to pass an afternoon.  

Kissing is the glory of humankind. All animals copulate but only humans touch to trigger sensation. 

Old Hassidic Jews often kiss their bread before they eat it. These are wonderful kisses that resonate into the cosmos, felt by the g-ds even.

There’s no other flesh like lip flesh, no other meat like mouth meat. Or, the sweet-sounding clink of tooth touching tooth.

It’s a rainy Saturday in Key West, Henry’s working in his study, typing madly as his Cuban wife Lucia comes in and says, 

kiss me bebe. 

He stands and they turn towards each other, embracing, then kissing, a meaty kiss, tongues galore, nasty. Henry asks, 

does your heart jump for joy when I kiss you? 

Pendejo, my heart isn't a poodle that jumps on command.

Henry and Lucia were different from their neighbors on Peach Street because they spent a good deal of time listening to music on their large Grundig Radio.

Neither of them understood the mechanics of much of anything, and the Grundig was no exception. Henry would strike the side of the old radio when the reception waned saying, 

common darling, give us all ya got, we need enough juice to finish the Ive’s Symphony.  

But, today, the rainy day, and the day of the meat kiss, old faithful dies. 

So, they wrap the dead radio in a white sheet, carry it to the backyard, burying it in the middle of the croquet field under the center hoop. After last rights Henry says, 

Let’s go the Sears Town and buy a radio. 

In the twinkling of an eye, they’ve, showered, groomed, and dressed. And are off, riding in their 73 Chevy Malibu to Peacock Plaza Road, then turning into Sears Town and parking. As they get out of the car, Lucia says, 

let’s go to Radio Shack, 

good idea baby, they don’t make Grundigs anymore, so a ghetto blaster might be the way to go. 

Inside Radio Shack a salesman approaches, he’s wearing a sporty company shirt, and his belly’s hanging over his white patent leather belt, 

how can I help you folks today? 

We need a new radio, a ghetto blaster maybe. 

Let’s take a walk, 

when they reach the radio section the salesman points and says, 

this fella here is a Hitachi TRK-8080E, a white folks ghetto blaster. 

He pops in a cassette, the sound's good, without overpowering bass so Henry says, 

wrap it up. 

The salesman quickly retrieves a box from the stock room and places it on the counter, Lucia pays 88 dollars cash. 

Driving south towards their bungalow they turn into The Sonic Drive-in. Lucia gets out of the car and walks to the counter and orders,

let's see, we'll have chicken fried steak, fried okra, collard greens, sweet yams, and two vanilla malts.  

They love The Sonic Drive-in, where the home-style southern cooking sings to the soul.

The drive-ins' carhop is a Black lady, real nice with red hair with a hairnet on. She passes two brown paper bags through the opening of the glass partition saying 

enjoy your soul food.

Home, they eat in the kitchen, drinking creme de menthe, vanilla shake, sonic shamrocks. 

Tired they strip, tossing their clothes on the floor. Before they fall asleep they promise to get up early to do something physical. This, dubious and out of the ordinary for them, because sex was the only physical thing they did regularly.

They are up at five, sipping coffee in the hot tub on the patio, and Lucia mentions last night, 

darling, last night we promised we'd do something physical today. 

Like what? 

Jet skiing? 

How’s that physical? 

Well, if you fall off the jet ski, you have to swim and get back on it.

That’s an awful thought, Lucia, people don’t fall off of jet skis. 

How bout fishing from the pier? 

It’s physical for the fish, only. 

OK, culo inteligente your turn, 

let’s walk to the Ernest Hemingway Museum and do the tour. 

It’s only five blocks Henry, 

OK then, we’ll walk somewhere else afterward.

They shower quickly, dress in shorts, tank tops, straw hats then Lucia asks, 

where are our jogging shoes?

We don’t have any darling, flip flops will do, 

chancletas for a marathon walk? 

Sure, ancient Roman soldiers marched from Constantinople to Gaul in leather sandals. 

Lead the way, Mark Anthony.

So, the heroic journey begins— five blocks to The Ernest Hemingway House and Museum. 

They walk east on Whitehall Street, bowled over with wistfulness seeing the neighborhood kids playing jacks, double dutch, and kick the can. 

The children's fresh-faced joie de vivre is infectious— the couple holds hands and skips the remaining way to the museum. 

There’s a line of papa wannabes a block long waiting to get in and Henry says candidly,

fuck this, I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay twenty bucks to pet a six-toed cat you can’t hold and tour empty rooms with furniture that only ghosts and cats can sit on. 

The controlled climate in the museum puts Henry on edge, like the impeded feeling you get in a bank. Anyway, Lucia says, 

let’s walk until we drop.

They walk ten blocks, surely, a world record for them, reaching the Key West Butterfly and Nature Conservative— a two-story conch-style house with a sprawling greenhouse behind it.

Agog, the couple walks into the lobby where they’re met by a caretaker who looks like Karl Marx and is wearing a safari suit with a pith helmet on his head. He says in a magisterial air,  

salutations, follow me into paradise and let your stress fade away as we commune with butterflies, flowering plants, waterfalls, and wing creatures in nature—all under climate control in a glass parrock. Henry whispers to Lucia, 

what the fuck is a parrock? 

Quiet Henry.

As they step into the glasshouse, they’re hit by a gust of flora oxygen that ameliorates their physical being. 

A kaleidoscope of butterflies lands on Manfred, the caretaker. He smiles, looking at the couple saying, 

You see, the Rhopalocera and I are old friends. 

As they approach the flamingos Manfred tells their story.

Our lovely flamingos were born on Valentine's Day. Our conservatory is the only place in Florida you can see flamingos. The sandy beach and pond were built especially for our pink babies, and after hours, they're free to roam the atrium. 

We feed them a special diet that contains the alpha and beta carotenoid pigments found in algae and various invertebrates that the birds eat in the wild, which gives them their pink color. 

I have work to do, thank you, and enjoy your stay. 

Henry walks toward a flamingo, wanting to make friends, and the bird grunts loudly, it's a warning. Lucia laughs saying, 

be careful darling,  paradise bites.