The Televisionary Oracle Read online

  My second flaw was on the inside of me, visible to no one at first. It was only after I entered my second year of life that outer signs of the flaw began to alert Magda and Jerome to it. Increasingly, the top of my head was warm to the touch and my eyes bugged out of my head and my skin broke into curious sweats. That was when the bird-woman, who had hovered around the three of us since the birth, took me away to live with her. It was she who paid for the doctors who discovered that my tiny heart was working overtime to compensate for a missing part.

  When I was eighteen months old, surgeons stretched my twenty-eight-inch body out on the table and sliced open two vertical and two horizontal inches of my chest in a good approximation of a cross. They reached inside to clip and sew my most important muscle, repairing the flawed circuit.

  So my head cooled down. My eyes bugged back into my head. The strange sweats stopped. And that two-inch by two-inch scar on my chest began to grow. With each passing year, it expanded, just like the rest of me. By the time I was nine years old, the horizontal line of the cross had stretched to four and three-sixteenths inches, and the vertical to three and five-eighths. I know, because I measured it regularly with my red plastic ruler. Meanwhile, my bull skull tattoo had grown too. It was one and one-sixteenth inches in diameter, with a left horn three-eighths of an inch long and the right a quarter-inch.

  As I know now, both of my flaws—my signatures—were responsible for me leaving Magda and Jerome and moving in permanently with the bird-woman. Just as they had been before I arrived, my birth parents were so poor they could barely take care of themselves properly, let alone a third member of their family. When my heart’s growing malfunction expanded beyond the scope of their financial resources, they turned to the person who had offered to care for me all along, and took her up on her offer. From a tiny, dingy apartment, I moved to a plush, luxurious mansion. From stained, secondhand baby clothes, I changed into vividly colored silks and satins and velvets.

  My heart’s flaw was the trick of fate the bird-woman used to claim me. My head’s flaw was the reason she wanted to claim me. It was the bull skull on my forehead—along with similar but less grotesque birthmarks behind my right knee and inside my labia majora—that convinced the bird-woman I was the long-prophesied reincarnation of Mary Magdalen, and future high priestess of her ancient mystery school.

  The third shining flaw? I’ll save that story for another time. Suffice to say that it was a secret to everyone, even me, until I reached the age of sexual maturity.

  While you commune with the Televisionary Oracle

  Your lucky number is 3.14159265

  Your secret name is Squeeze

  The colors of your soul are diamond-hatched and marbled blue

  Your special emotion is skeptical faith

  The garage sale item you most resemble

  is an old but beautiful and sonorous accordion with a broken key

  Your magic smell is candy skulls

  being crushed on graves by dancing feet

  Your holiest pain comes from your ability

  to sense other people’s cracked notions about you

  Your sacred fungus is yeast

  Your special time of day is the moment just before the mist evaporates

  The shape of your life is oval with soft dark sparks

  Your lucky phobia is epienopopontonphobia,

  or fear of crossing the wine-dark sea

  Your power spot is here and there

  The flavor which identifies you most is grapefruit smeared with honey

  The following exercise is designed to upgrade and refine your screaming skills. It is not meant to be a decadent indulgence, but a means to an end—a technique for flushing away any resentments, terrors, and rages that might be threatening your ability to feel horny for spiders, museums, lightning, crayons, mountains—and even the Internet itself!

  To begin, curl yourself up into a fetal position, make your breathing shallow, and tense all the muscles in your body as tight as they’ll go. Try to include even your obscure, little-used muscles, as well as those you might not even be aware you have. The hundreds of muscles in the face are especially important.

  Tense every muscle in your body.

  Hold.

  Hold.

  Keep holding. Keep holding.

  And release.

  Now even as you withdraw your concentration from this full-bore constriction, try to keep a great deal of residual tension active in the background. Give the command to your subconscious mind to remain on high alert, with maximum stress. Begin to envision what it would be like to tense up your organs themselves.

  To assist in this process, you may want to visualize your worst fears.

  Imagine a person who hates you, and picture all the terrible qualities this person attributes to you.

  Summon the memory of the worst betrayal in your life, the most traumatic violation.

  Envision yourself dying alone in a horrible way.

  While holding those scenes in the forefront of your awareness, work yourself up into the most galling discomfort you’re capable of.

  Tense every muscle in your body, every nerve, every organ. Turn yourself into a taught bundle of astringent fear and hatred.

  Hold.

  Hold.

  Keep holding. Keep holding.

  And release.

  Now allow yourself to squeal a low whine in the shape of the sound “no.”

  Take a breath and again emit a pitiful, desperate moan that circles around the curse “no.”

  Draw another breath, and spurt another “no.”

  Begin to uncoil yourself from the fetal position, all the while spilling the holy “no” from the abyss inside.

  Now stand up.

  Straight and tall.

  Bend and stretch and reach for the sky.

  Stick out your tongue and cross your eyes and put on your ugliest face.

  Take five fast breaths and then unfurl a yowling “no” against all of the wounds life has forced you to endure.

  Wave your arms and leap off the ground and punch the air.

  Spin around in erratic circles while slobbering and mussing your hair.

  Shriek “no.”

  Wail “nooooooooo.”

  Faster.

  Harder.

  Wilder.

  Feel nothing but your own juicy, red, oozing, unscratchable pain from the beginning of time.

  Lurch, gnash, writhe, and twist until you realize there’s no longer any need for you to pretend to be in control.

  And now unleash the sound of a hurricane lashing an erupting volcano.

  Ululate the cacophony of an earthquake in a forest fire.

  And keep screaming until the alphabet is gone.

  Everyone in the world

  secretly died of disinfotainment

  while watching a holocaust

  of boring love

  on TV

  during a nuclear war

  back in 1999,

  and therefore

  WE ARE ALL LIVING IN PARADISE

  AT THIS VERY MOMENT!

  I’m crushed. Crashed. Thoroughly crunched. Rapunzel abandoned me right in the middle of our love feast in the Catalyst bathroom. Sulking, I contemplate my next move. I sit down on the sidewalk in front of the nightclub, leaning against a wall. My attention is drawn to objects weighing down the pockets of my new shirt.

  In the right pocket is a small hardback book. In the left is a sealed envelope which contains a soft, puffy object. Both items are plum-colored.

  The book cover shows a familiar image: the statuesque vulture with the lovely face and alluring breasts. The only difference here is that the strange creature is not naked, but scantily clad with a lacy red bustiere and red panties. The book’s title: Menstrual Lingerie Fashion Show. It lists no author or editor. Inside are fifty-five pages of glossy, full-color photographs of female models posed on a runway. But most of these are not ordinary models, and this is no ordinary fashion show. I spy o
nly a couple of women who come close to matching the pouty, anorexic specifications of the icons who populate the runways of Milan and Paris. Buck-teethed, pear-shaped, midlife women are the norm here. Saggy-titted, cellulite-proud, pigeon-toed women. Crone-faced, hairy-legged, big-nosed women.

  “Demeter,” for instance, a wild-eyed Caucasian woman in her fifties, has unkempt sandy grey hair—including quite a bush under each arm—and breasts that must have nursed several kids. I could easily picture her pushing a shopping cart full of all her wordly belongings down a city street. But here, instead of being garbed in a ripped 1950s-style house dress over baggy khaki work pants and moldy sneakers, she’s in a sheer mauve lace bodystocking with embroidered butterflies and a tall, conical, violet witch’s hat. Unlike the sleek, steely body language of all the models I’ve ever seen, Demeter has one leg bent and raised, and her arms are akimbo like a praying mantis doing tai chi.

  “Hecate” is a pregnant woman in her twenties with dyed purple hair and countless body piercings, as well as a metal brace on her right leg. She’s sporting a lovely emerald silk charmeuse camisole beneath a cape of white eagle feathers. Around her surging waistline is what appears to be a live snake, grasping its own tail in its mouth.

  Holding a broom between her legs, “Tiamat” models a tapestry merrywidow with a gold bull skull talisman woven into the crook of the bra. A tall woman with glasses, a large forehead, and heavy legs, she looks remarkably like my third-grade teacher, Mrs. Byrd. It couldn’t possibly be she, though, could it? I always had an inexplicable crush on her, which of course I never admitted to anyone, especially because all my friends thought she looked weird.

  My favorite model in the Menstrual Lingerie Fashion Show is “Vimala.” A vigorous-looking old crone sporting shoulder-length dreadlocks, she’s one of the few models with an anatomy approaching the red-blooded American male’s 36-23-36 ideal. In addition to purple cowgirl boots, a lacy red bra, and a red leather mini-skirt, she’s wearing a tall crown of inflated pink and purple balloons tied together in the shape of a vulture. Further accessorizing the look is a necklace of tiny skulls, the candy kind that you get in Mexico during the Day of the Dead ceremonies.

  Yow. I mean hallelujah. I mean what the fuck. Feminist pornography. Goddess-sanctioned lust-arousers. I’m dizzy. Itchy. Alienated but fascinated. Repulsed yet totally turned on. I’ve got to explore this further.

  After studying each photo intently, I close the book and my eyes. My thoughts drift, in an inevitable comparison, to my customary experience of viewing the naked bodies of women I don’t know. I must confess that when I’m at the liquor store buying cherry cider and olives for a post-midnight snack, I now and then fail to avert my eyes from the porn magazine section. I especially fail to avert my eyes from Swank magazine, which I’ve adjudged to be the least demeaning towards women and the most titillating to me. Yes, it’s true that a suspiciously huge majority of the models are well within the criteria by which my conditioned reflexes evaluate beauty. But at least they’re not depicted in degrading poses. They’re not portrayed as being abused or dominated. They actually appear to be enjoying themselves. All that’s got to count for something.

  What vexes me even about the women in Swank, though, is their universally scoured, waxen, alabaster look. Profuse make-up has been applied to camouflage their “flaws.” Photographic touch-up techniques do the rest. There’s never a hint of leg hair or, for that matter, a cut from shaving. All underarm fur is scraped away. If it’s there at all, the pubic hair is manicured like an English garden. Far too often the bodies reveal the grotesque blend of anorexia and silicone. Unlike real women, whose breasts differ in size and shape, many of the Swank siliconites have a perfectly matched pair.

  There’s a part of me—and not just the moralist and feminist in me, either—that hates this approach to beauty. Lately I’ve taken to boycotting any porn rag unless it features at least a few women whose breasts have never communed with silicone. And I truly prefer the presence rather than the absence of underarm hair.

  But I’d be a slimy patriarchal dissembler if I tried to pretend that Swank and its ilk don’t provoke in me an instant hard-on. I’m proud to say, however, that it’s a sterile, dessicated hard-on. A like-eating-highly-processed-junk-food hard-on. A temperature-controlled, artificially-scented, recycled-airplane-air, muzak-in-the-elevator hard-on. In short, an impotent hard-on.

  I may get lathered up for the wrong reasons, in other words, but at least I feel guilty about it. And to my further credit, I’m aware of the fact that there are right reasons—which ideally I’m on the verge of mastering.

  So how am I doing with this project, anyway? To what degree have I purged all non-feminist hormones from my lust? Maybe I should take advantage of the opportunity afforded me by Rapunzel’s little picture book to take an inventory. Can I truly say I’m sincerely turned on in the most spiritually correct way by the women of the Menstrual Lingerie Fashion Show? Women who in their deviation from the freakish standards established by professional models are the very embodiment of normal? I would like to say yes. I would love nothing more than to be able to testify without any qualification—passing a lie detector test if necessary—that these pear-shaped, pigeon-toed, big-nosed women do indeed prime my kundalini for all the right reasons.

  A judgment in my favor would serve many noble purposes, besides opening up a vast new repository of candidates for seduction. Most importantly, it would launch a healthy new chapter in the sordid history of my relationship with my conscience. The fact is that whereas the bulk of the population has installed in their superego a variation on the pissed-off, misogynist God of the Old Testament, mine is occupied by a very different archetype. Though sometimes she takes the form of a cagey, tender goddess like, say, Sophia of esoteric Christianity, more often she’s a frowning fanatical harpy who has much in common with Medusa-clones like anti-porn crusaders Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon. The endless streams of bile that spew from this aspect of my nasty inner critic may be the closest a patriarchal stooge like myself can ever come to knowing what it means to be battered. But I can imagine in thrilling detail the freedom that would burst out in my heart if I could convince the Dour Matriarchal Judge I was fully aligned with her agendas.

  “No, Judge, I am not a looksist,” I could appeal to her with a totally straight face. “I am not a bigot who evaluates women first of all on their appearance. My attraction depends more on their inner than outer qualities. I may be a slobbering lecher, but at least my slobbering lechery is fueled by only the most righteous motivations.”

  Before I could in good conscience approach the bench with this plea, however, I’d have to convince myself of its verity. The Judge deals harshly with self-deception.

  So what about it? Do I believe my own wishful assertions?

  There is a certain amount of evidence in favor of this interpretation. Exhibit A: Ever since I explored the “feminist porn” in Rapunzel’s book, I have been luxuriating in a most sumptuous blooming of what the tantric poets refer to as the jade stalk. What further data could possibly refute that ringing empirical documentation?

  I bask now in the fantasy that I could actually feel happy and festive and self-respectful about being a testosterone-possessed fucknut. Emerging from my meditation, I leaf through the last few pages of the Menstrual Lingerie Fashion Show. Tucked between the last page and the back cover is a loose, rumpled piece of lavender paper folded into quarters. I open it up and find a text printed by hand. “Dear Rockstar,” it begins. I feel a flush of excitement as I contemplate the possibility that Rapunzel didn’t abandon me after all. She’s just playing an interesting game with me. This is her next gambit. I eagerly devour the message.

  Dear Rockstar,

  Memorize every word of the text you’re holding in your hands. You will be tested.

  There are two doors between this world and the other world. Womb and tomb. Coming and going. Imagine a menstruating woman as one who opens both doors at the same time
and peers both ways. When the uterine nest begins to disintegrate, the unfertilized ovum dies. Yet in the same instant, a hormonal message zooms to the ovaries, triggering the bloom of a new candidate.

  So yes, women flirt with a little death every month. But it’s a good death, a friendly death. When the magical “wound” between our legs bleeds, it purifies and renews us. No such luck for men. They can go on for months without any physical crisis that forces them to purge accumulated toxins. Or at least they think they can go on for months. In fact, many phallus-bearers walk around half-poisoned most of the time, unaware of how frenetically their rational minds are working to concoct logical explanations for their nasty, unacknowledged feelings.

  The upshot is that women have a more convivial relationship with blood. For them, its flow symbolizes regeneration. For most men, the loss of blood portends plain old literal death; the ultimate humiliation; the ghastly annihilation of their one and only body.

  There have been a few exceptional men who’ve courted the power of those who bleed but do not die. Maybe you’ll be one?

  Ancient tantric texts advise male initiates to make love with menstruating women if they want to grow wiser and stronger. Many shamanic cultures from Siberia to America were more likely to choose a man to be chief boohoo if he acted like a woman.

  And we can’t overlook good old Jesus. After he died, a soldier pierced his side with a spear, unleashing a stream of blood and water. In that lucky moment, he acquired a symbolic vulva; he mutated into an honorary menstruator. The bleeding slit was the seal of his immortality, the sign that his death was merely prelude to resurrection.

  The Fisher King in the Grail legends wooed the same potency. The wound in his thigh gave him the chance to imitate a menstruator. He wasn’t just an average dickhead, but a magical androgyne who’d taken on the power of a woman to regenerate herself.