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—
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.
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—
<< Home