“I leave group with my fish eyes, warm sunned body, and head to my room feeling the best and worst I have ever
felt. So then I’m napping and have a wild dream that I’m flying, although it’s not so incredible in the dream.
t’s just natural, all that flying. I’m way up over the city, but I must have some eagle-vision or something because I
can see the color of people’s eyes, and my hearing is perfect too because I hear all this talking. Some of the
languages I don’t even understand, but one language really comes to me, ‘resonates’ is what Greg would later
say. I understood the language, though I couldn’t speak it to you right now.
It was a mixture of slogans, song lyrics, scientific texts, and children’s stories all mixed together. It said
something like ‘I think I can, I think I can shake dreams from your hair my pretty child by symbioses through
keeping it simple stupid.’ You know, it’s The Little Train that Could with The Doors, AA, and scientific shit I don’t
even get totally. It doesn’t sound or mean much now, but you should have heard it in that dream language! It had
some rhythm like a train that made numerous stops and changed its speed frequently.
And get this, I’m looking toward this voice which is coming out from the middle of a park that has old castle
buildings on one side, a desert on the other, and then some Rivers and oceans and stuff on the backside, and I
swear it was Chad, though he’s a little older.
Then he starts calling me Kate. ‘Kate! Kate!’ he says, ‘You have visitors,’ and I’m looking around to see if
anyone is flying next to me and there’s nobody so I start gliding a little toward Chad to get a closer look to see if I’
m really right. I decide at that moment, if it is Chad, I’m gonna grab him in my talons and pick him up and never
let him go. When I think this, I have an eagle head because the smirk of my face and beak reflects the intensity of
the decision I’ve made.
He’s still calling me “Kate” and I want him to stop because I want to be Mom again. I’m almost close enough to
make out the exact details of his nose and small ears—because he’s a little older you know, about 30— and then
he yells ‘Kate’ one more time and I open my eyes to Mary, my roommate standing over me saying I have a visitor.
‘No Shit.’ I said, ‘I was flying.’
‘Relapse dream,’ she said convinced.
‘No, not that kind of flying. This was natural I guess. I turned into an eagle.’
‘Me too, after taking a sheet of acid at a Supertramp concert in Tiger Stadium under the grandstands. I jumped
off what I thought to be the top of the grandstands and fell on my face. It must have looked fucking stupid,
jumping into the air and diving on your face. Nobody saw it happen, thank God.’
“I go to see the visitor. I don’t put makeup on or anything, just a pair of jeans and a wife beater with no bra. On
my way to the visiting room one of the care workers tells me it’s not appropriate attire so I go back and throw a
dark t-shirt over it so you can’t see my nipples because I didn’t want to lose my daily points and be short of
cigarette money at the end of the week.
Greg’s in the waiting room. His hair is all frazzled and you’d swear he was part black with that afro, and that
bulge in his brown hip-hugger corduroys. His glasses are tinted purple, but everything else on him is brown. He’
s smiling really big like he’s already stoned and says ‘Hello Goddess.’ and that’s about better than the group
telling me that they loved me.
We hop into his car and we just sit there for a minute looking out the front windshield. I guess we are both
thinking. I’m thinking that goddesses must be able to fly, and if they are always good, but I knew they were bad
sometimes. They had been preaching to us in treatment about finding some “higher power” and I didn’t give it
much thought until I found this book called “The Masks of God” which was really hip and covered all times and all
places in the whole world, not just Jesus and a bunch of guys—this was about women and stuff.
But the thing was, nothing was really clear. I mean I couldn’t tell what was good and what was bad. All these
ceremonies and sacrifices seemed to cancel themselves out. It was about killing a bad chicken to have good
eggs. Then there was this part about earth goddesses, which Greg said I was. Goddesses were almost always
mothers and usually had some child at their breast which was supposed to be an enduring force, and the
goddess and child together were like one thing, one unit inseparable. Both the mother and child felt the same
things through ‘symbioses,’ both physical and psychic.
I always knew I was psychic. A gypsy woman told me that once. So this unit of goddess and child was like a
universe all tending toward the good of itself and bliss, which is like ecstasy, an orgasm. So that’s the good part.
But that bad part, like always, is that not even goddesses can anticipate everything and there are times when the
universe doesn’t correspond with what is really needed.
This happens when that little child starts remembering how we was pushed out of a black vaginal hole all bloody
and screaming. At this point the child forgets everything, his mother, the universe, the bliss of sucking on mother’
s boob and then the mother is identified with the kids destruction. I was reading it under the covers in the middle
of the night with a Zippo and started crying because I’m thinking Chad realized this a long time ago and I was
never gonna have him back at my breast again so I realize that’s why I’m sticking my tit in everybody else’s mouth
and that’s why the counselors are on my ass about being promiscuous and stuff like that.
So the goddess is beatitude on the one hand, and terrible destruction on the other. Damn. And if that’s not heavy
enough, the book starts getting really specific and talking about a Hindu goddess named ‘Kali’ which looks a little
like ‘Kate’ when it’s written out, and she has a long tongue, which licks up the lives and blood of children just like
a pig sometimes eats her little piggies. And yet this goddess is not bad, she’s often portrayed with a child at her
breast.
So you’ve got heaven and hell and what’s in between is this fucking treatment center so I start thinking that I am
a goddess, good and bad and I tell Greg to start the car because I’m waiting for something at my breast and
bliss. I’m ready to be a cannibal too, if you know what I mean girl! Next thing you know we’re at the end of
Forestville Road surrounded by woods and a little house where a chainsaw sculptor lives and he’s got huge
carvings of Eagles and Bear and old men smoking pipes and the Madonna. We park and get out. There’s a big
‘slam because the door is so heavy and I shudder a little because I’m still sensitive to loud sounds. Reminds
me of fists and all that stuff, you know what I mean.
“‘Cool,’ I say as I stop and really take a good look at the art. Greg takes my hand and pulls a little, but then he
stops too and we have another moment where we are just staring together and that’s when it felt like we were
talking the most. Then he pulls again after a couple minutes and we go off into the windows and strip down buck-
naked, but its fun. It’s not really just about sex. Things were always a little different with Greg. He had some kind
of special wits, though they weren’t always there. He’s completely naked except for a backpack and I ask him
what’s in it. He says a good bottle of wine and some weed. Then I question his wits.
‘What the hell is that for?’ I say, ‘You know where I am?’
‘With our Mother,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘With our Mother, you know, the goddess Mother Earth,’ and then he starts quoting the bible for justification,
“Genesis 1:29. And god said behold, I have given you every plant bearing seed and tree bearing fruit which is
upon the face of the whole earth. To you it shall be meat.” It sounded good to me, but I just didn’t think it was
right. I could tell he wasn’t so sure either so he didn’t pressure me much after that, but he did take some for
himself and rejoiced with the goddesses. Next thing you know he’s got the open bottle in one hand, a joint in the
other, and I’m bent over a tree getting it full throttle. I’m flying again, thinking about Chad, and thinking that Greg’s
got some downfalls, but he’s getting educated and loves Chad so I give in and let myself really go and the
ecstasy come, and come if you know what I mean, girl! We get dressed and time has really passed so he
speeds me back to the treatment center.
“So I get this idea that I’m a goddess and tell everybody at treatment that I’m a goddess and that’s my spirituality
and then they say that won’t work because you can’t be your own higher power, you need to have a power greater
than yourself and then you can be restored to sanity. Well Jesus fucking Christ. I had never thought that hard
before about anything, and it was all for nothing. ‘But I feel good about myself now,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a man who
calls me a goddess, I’ve got these huge life-giving breasts full of bliss, child-bearing hips…what the hell?’
‘Right on Kate! Johnny W. says I’m with you baby! You’re my Higher Power!’ The counselors just shake their
heads and tell me to keep coming back which means I’m supposed to stick with the program and these twelve
steps that tell me I’m powerless and pretty soon things will be revealed.”
The conversation was long and I was taking notes the whole time by assigning stories to various toys as
mnemonic devices. The bionic man was the dream. My Charlie McCarthy puppet was Greg. My Legos were the
treatment center, and the weeble-wobble people filled in the rest of the gaps. I built the story right in the middle of
the bedroom and then asked Shelly if she wanted to really play.
“I mean really play,” I said emphatically. I stripped Shelly down to her panties and went over to my new Fischer
Price record player in the corner. I swung the purple plastic arm around and dug the needle into a 45 of Heart’s
“Barracuda” and turned it up until the cheap speakers were distorting.
“Fuck yea” I said at 6. I floated over to Shelly in my birthday suit, bent her over and jammed to “Barracuda” as I
faked adult ecstasy the best I could while gyrating all over her emulating Greg and Mother’s story. I reached
around to grab her breasts that wouldn’t be there for another ten year. I just couldn’t fly like Mother. My wings
were clipped. I had become The-Boy-Worth-Mentioning in Shelly’s private mythology, full of knowledge and
lacking sense. That’s what ecstasy does to you. I bent her all over the bedroom and Greg came over and joined-
in in the other room filling Mother full of compliments and weed. Her complexion flushed and the familiar warmth
that drugs brought heaved in her breasts.
She forgot she was supposed to be powerless and let the goddess run wild. She poured wine into her mouth
and let it run down her chin into her cleavage. It was beatitude and it was devastating. We all dug each other.
And then we moved
felt. So then I’m napping and have a wild dream that I’m flying, although it’s not so incredible in the dream.
t’s just natural, all that flying. I’m way up over the city, but I must have some eagle-vision or something because I
can see the color of people’s eyes, and my hearing is perfect too because I hear all this talking. Some of the
languages I don’t even understand, but one language really comes to me, ‘resonates’ is what Greg would later
say. I understood the language, though I couldn’t speak it to you right now.
It was a mixture of slogans, song lyrics, scientific texts, and children’s stories all mixed together. It said
something like ‘I think I can, I think I can shake dreams from your hair my pretty child by symbioses through
keeping it simple stupid.’ You know, it’s The Little Train that Could with The Doors, AA, and scientific shit I don’t
even get totally. It doesn’t sound or mean much now, but you should have heard it in that dream language! It had
some rhythm like a train that made numerous stops and changed its speed frequently.
And get this, I’m looking toward this voice which is coming out from the middle of a park that has old castle
buildings on one side, a desert on the other, and then some Rivers and oceans and stuff on the backside, and I
swear it was Chad, though he’s a little older.
Then he starts calling me Kate. ‘Kate! Kate!’ he says, ‘You have visitors,’ and I’m looking around to see if
anyone is flying next to me and there’s nobody so I start gliding a little toward Chad to get a closer look to see if I’
m really right. I decide at that moment, if it is Chad, I’m gonna grab him in my talons and pick him up and never
let him go. When I think this, I have an eagle head because the smirk of my face and beak reflects the intensity of
the decision I’ve made.
He’s still calling me “Kate” and I want him to stop because I want to be Mom again. I’m almost close enough to
make out the exact details of his nose and small ears—because he’s a little older you know, about 30— and then
he yells ‘Kate’ one more time and I open my eyes to Mary, my roommate standing over me saying I have a visitor.
‘No Shit.’ I said, ‘I was flying.’
‘Relapse dream,’ she said convinced.
‘No, not that kind of flying. This was natural I guess. I turned into an eagle.’
‘Me too, after taking a sheet of acid at a Supertramp concert in Tiger Stadium under the grandstands. I jumped
off what I thought to be the top of the grandstands and fell on my face. It must have looked fucking stupid,
jumping into the air and diving on your face. Nobody saw it happen, thank God.’
“I go to see the visitor. I don’t put makeup on or anything, just a pair of jeans and a wife beater with no bra. On
my way to the visiting room one of the care workers tells me it’s not appropriate attire so I go back and throw a
dark t-shirt over it so you can’t see my nipples because I didn’t want to lose my daily points and be short of
cigarette money at the end of the week.
Greg’s in the waiting room. His hair is all frazzled and you’d swear he was part black with that afro, and that
bulge in his brown hip-hugger corduroys. His glasses are tinted purple, but everything else on him is brown. He’
s smiling really big like he’s already stoned and says ‘Hello Goddess.’ and that’s about better than the group
telling me that they loved me.
We hop into his car and we just sit there for a minute looking out the front windshield. I guess we are both
thinking. I’m thinking that goddesses must be able to fly, and if they are always good, but I knew they were bad
sometimes. They had been preaching to us in treatment about finding some “higher power” and I didn’t give it
much thought until I found this book called “The Masks of God” which was really hip and covered all times and all
places in the whole world, not just Jesus and a bunch of guys—this was about women and stuff.
But the thing was, nothing was really clear. I mean I couldn’t tell what was good and what was bad. All these
ceremonies and sacrifices seemed to cancel themselves out. It was about killing a bad chicken to have good
eggs. Then there was this part about earth goddesses, which Greg said I was. Goddesses were almost always
mothers and usually had some child at their breast which was supposed to be an enduring force, and the
goddess and child together were like one thing, one unit inseparable. Both the mother and child felt the same
things through ‘symbioses,’ both physical and psychic.
I always knew I was psychic. A gypsy woman told me that once. So this unit of goddess and child was like a
universe all tending toward the good of itself and bliss, which is like ecstasy, an orgasm. So that’s the good part.
But that bad part, like always, is that not even goddesses can anticipate everything and there are times when the
universe doesn’t correspond with what is really needed.
This happens when that little child starts remembering how we was pushed out of a black vaginal hole all bloody
and screaming. At this point the child forgets everything, his mother, the universe, the bliss of sucking on mother’
s boob and then the mother is identified with the kids destruction. I was reading it under the covers in the middle
of the night with a Zippo and started crying because I’m thinking Chad realized this a long time ago and I was
never gonna have him back at my breast again so I realize that’s why I’m sticking my tit in everybody else’s mouth
and that’s why the counselors are on my ass about being promiscuous and stuff like that.
So the goddess is beatitude on the one hand, and terrible destruction on the other. Damn. And if that’s not heavy
enough, the book starts getting really specific and talking about a Hindu goddess named ‘Kali’ which looks a little
like ‘Kate’ when it’s written out, and she has a long tongue, which licks up the lives and blood of children just like
a pig sometimes eats her little piggies. And yet this goddess is not bad, she’s often portrayed with a child at her
breast.
So you’ve got heaven and hell and what’s in between is this fucking treatment center so I start thinking that I am
a goddess, good and bad and I tell Greg to start the car because I’m waiting for something at my breast and
bliss. I’m ready to be a cannibal too, if you know what I mean girl! Next thing you know we’re at the end of
Forestville Road surrounded by woods and a little house where a chainsaw sculptor lives and he’s got huge
carvings of Eagles and Bear and old men smoking pipes and the Madonna. We park and get out. There’s a big
‘slam because the door is so heavy and I shudder a little because I’m still sensitive to loud sounds. Reminds
me of fists and all that stuff, you know what I mean.
“‘Cool,’ I say as I stop and really take a good look at the art. Greg takes my hand and pulls a little, but then he
stops too and we have another moment where we are just staring together and that’s when it felt like we were
talking the most. Then he pulls again after a couple minutes and we go off into the windows and strip down buck-
naked, but its fun. It’s not really just about sex. Things were always a little different with Greg. He had some kind
of special wits, though they weren’t always there. He’s completely naked except for a backpack and I ask him
what’s in it. He says a good bottle of wine and some weed. Then I question his wits.
‘What the hell is that for?’ I say, ‘You know where I am?’
‘With our Mother,’ he says.
‘What?’
‘With our Mother, you know, the goddess Mother Earth,’ and then he starts quoting the bible for justification,
“Genesis 1:29. And god said behold, I have given you every plant bearing seed and tree bearing fruit which is
upon the face of the whole earth. To you it shall be meat.” It sounded good to me, but I just didn’t think it was
right. I could tell he wasn’t so sure either so he didn’t pressure me much after that, but he did take some for
himself and rejoiced with the goddesses. Next thing you know he’s got the open bottle in one hand, a joint in the
other, and I’m bent over a tree getting it full throttle. I’m flying again, thinking about Chad, and thinking that Greg’s
got some downfalls, but he’s getting educated and loves Chad so I give in and let myself really go and the
ecstasy come, and come if you know what I mean, girl! We get dressed and time has really passed so he
speeds me back to the treatment center.
“So I get this idea that I’m a goddess and tell everybody at treatment that I’m a goddess and that’s my spirituality
and then they say that won’t work because you can’t be your own higher power, you need to have a power greater
than yourself and then you can be restored to sanity. Well Jesus fucking Christ. I had never thought that hard
before about anything, and it was all for nothing. ‘But I feel good about myself now,’ I said. ‘I’ve got a man who
calls me a goddess, I’ve got these huge life-giving breasts full of bliss, child-bearing hips…what the hell?’
‘Right on Kate! Johnny W. says I’m with you baby! You’re my Higher Power!’ The counselors just shake their
heads and tell me to keep coming back which means I’m supposed to stick with the program and these twelve
steps that tell me I’m powerless and pretty soon things will be revealed.”
The conversation was long and I was taking notes the whole time by assigning stories to various toys as
mnemonic devices. The bionic man was the dream. My Charlie McCarthy puppet was Greg. My Legos were the
treatment center, and the weeble-wobble people filled in the rest of the gaps. I built the story right in the middle of
the bedroom and then asked Shelly if she wanted to really play.
“I mean really play,” I said emphatically. I stripped Shelly down to her panties and went over to my new Fischer
Price record player in the corner. I swung the purple plastic arm around and dug the needle into a 45 of Heart’s
“Barracuda” and turned it up until the cheap speakers were distorting.
“Fuck yea” I said at 6. I floated over to Shelly in my birthday suit, bent her over and jammed to “Barracuda” as I
faked adult ecstasy the best I could while gyrating all over her emulating Greg and Mother’s story. I reached
around to grab her breasts that wouldn’t be there for another ten year. I just couldn’t fly like Mother. My wings
were clipped. I had become The-Boy-Worth-Mentioning in Shelly’s private mythology, full of knowledge and
lacking sense. That’s what ecstasy does to you. I bent her all over the bedroom and Greg came over and joined-
in in the other room filling Mother full of compliments and weed. Her complexion flushed and the familiar warmth
that drugs brought heaved in her breasts.
She forgot she was supposed to be powerless and let the goddess run wild. She poured wine into her mouth
and let it run down her chin into her cleavage. It was beatitude and it was devastating. We all dug each other.
And then we moved
FURTHER DOWN LINCOLN STREET
PAGE TWO
PAGE TWO