Passion Play

"Could he make such a mistake? No! No! It can't be! He is God!!!" all the women whispered. "Please don't say anything. How can you do this? You must submit to him. He alone has wisdom. He alone can protect us from the terrifying wanton desires that plague us so. Ssh, sshh, don't cause any ripples on the pond. If he is happy then we will be happy. He will give us what we want."

"What do you want?" Thunderheart asked the women. "Tell me. I really want to know."

"We want what he alone can give us," echoed the stream of "ladies."

"Yeah, right . . . what is it? What is this precious thing that he alone can give you?"

The women were uneasy. No one answered Thunderheart's direct question. Thunderheart rubbed her bald head and slid her cap back on. "Yo, is anyone out there? Please, I'm really dying to know . . . well actually, I'm not dying to know really . . . but let me say I'm intensely curious why you give this guy so much power and say over your lives."

Condescending looks plastered the women's faces. Sally-Jane's hands were shaking. "This is all blasphemy." She crossed her heart with the special sign of reverence, as if this would protect her from Thunderheart's probing questions. "If you must ask such a question then you can't understand what he gives to us. You are not submitted so you cannot possibly understand. I see, sister, that you are deluded."

"Yes, yes . . . she is deluded . . . " It became an increasingly louder chant.

"Ah, they are scared . . . a jumble of fears . . . ask a simple question . . . ah . . . religious fanatics . . . " Thunderheart picked her nose and shot the snot at the women and walked away.

Sonic Player washed the make up off his face. He was too tired to pull off the several gold rings that were piercing his left ear. Whoa, I'm beat, he thought . . . But not too beat to slip into my favorite posture with Apostrophe. She's a little on the strange side . . . not good looking or too bright (her skin was a paler shade of porcelain white) . . . she does have a way about her . . . I just can't figure it . . . what kind of hold she has over me. She possesses me! . . . and that she is heir to a fortune is like frosting on the cake! Apostrophe wouldn't inherit any of the millions she was in line for 'til her mother died, which you never know . . .

Apostrophe earned her living by working in the toy department at the west end L-Mart. She got to keep any of the toys that had been opened and tampered with. She liked putting them back together in another way. Barbie Goes Hawaiian was missing an arm and Apost took out the other arm and gave Barbie feathered wings instead. She called her creation, Barbie Goes Bird!

"Just think of all the money Barbie saves on airline flights . . . "

"Yeah," said Sonic, "but she flies alone . . . no coffee, tea or horrible movie to watch."

"I guess that's the price of being different or having an adventurous spirit . . . none of the conveniences . . . none of the drugs to lull you . . . to keep you quiet . . . "

"Can't we have both?" Sonic inquired. "Pleasure, convenience . . . frightening, daring, thrilling adventures?"

"Yeah, if you live in an amusement park . . . I suppose."

"You got that right . . . but nothing's for free . . . right, dear . . . Hey, babe . . . I love you . . . horny . . . too?"

"Love you too, babe . . . my desire is not running that way . . . "

"Well, are you selling then?"

"Yeah, my savings to buy a saxophone is not even into the three-digit zone. How much?"

"I got $75 from the gig . . . a massage, too." Sonic took out the bills and counted them. "Yep, that's what I got . . . "

Apostrophe took the money and pictured blowing out a sweet, sexy song on the saxophone. Sonic looked eager like a little kid. She peeled off his pantyhose and squirted oil down his lengthy thighs. This guy is a nut but he respects me, thought Apostrophe. No one ever did before he did. Yeah, and he is the only man who is comfortable in a dress. I can't stand those damn pantyhose. Yuk.

Twenty-four hours a day of relaxing into a clenched assertion, Kirksome's mantra was: "No . . . I won't feel . . . I won't feel . . . I won't feel . . . You can't make me feel . . . I know I am right. I have the supreme law on my side. Master La Booba has written volumes on this matter. Please step aside. Now be on your way, madam."

"Sir, about this matter at hand . . . what are you going to do about it? We need your guidance. Couldn't we have a meeting to discuss its implications? This could be big trouble. I met that woman, Thunderheart . . . she is really crazy."

"Sally-Jane, my suggestion to you is to read the 5,000 pages on this topic. He will guide you. STAY AWAY FROM THAT WOMAN. I will do the prayer of rigidity. Our Master has particularly suggested this prayer for times like these. Now I must retire into the deepness."

"But Kirksome, I have a bad feeling about this."

"Don't trust your feelings . . . submit to him. These feelings are only delusion."

"But, I had these very strong dreams about her . . . I'm scared. She is calling me to something."

"Those dreams are just delusions. If you keep this up, Sally-Jane, I will recommend that your access to Master La Booba be revoked. If he hears about this . . . you know how sensitive he is. It could make him very ill . . . and you would be responsible . . . You don't want to bother him with this, do you?"

"No, he is my life . . . I wouldn't do anything to hurt him. I was just . . . concerned."

"Your practice is to submit to . . . "

"I know . . . but . . ."

"Pray sister, pray . . . to be worthy to receive HIM."

"Thank you Kirksome. I understand now. I will ignore these feelings. I won't feel. I will submit to the teaching. The Master surely speaks through you. I feel his presence."

"Yes, it is so. Yes, it is written."

Geezs, thought Sonic. This is getting to be like a punctuation . . . a mark of the possessive case . . . or could it be the omission of a LETTER or a figure? Maybe Apostrophe would understand all this . . . These dreams are getting more frequent . . . I'm getting them in the daytime now, too. Wired . . . for special transmission . . . Geezs . . .

"I won't feel, I won't feel . . . who is this guy?"

Boom, boom, crackle. Can you hear the drumming of the light show? Waves of music pound the front rows. Noise so loud that Thunderheart couldn't decipher individual origins. All instruments pleated out one shout of . . . no one could be heard . . . just one shouted feeling: one state of mind . . . a violent touch. Falling and splattering onto the ground. She was dancing madly, wildly in casanding gestures, still as ever in the eye of the hurricane.

Sweet tarts for my babe . . . the final chorus . . .

She dodged the bodies of wandering desire and hit the cool air of the suburban town. It was a cold night, in the low thirties. Thunderheart zipped up her leather jacket and flew to the parking lot. Disc 7, track 4. Yeah, that's it. I got it tonight. Would she be celibate for the rest of her life? Who gives a shit, she thought. Every day of my life is a fuck . . . a fucking wonderful movement of fast dreaming in the play of perceptual bliss. She moved to the beat. She crooned to the rpm's. Thirty, forty, fifty, the city blurred by. She wanted to let her cat stretch its limbs, push it to the quickened motion . . . so horrendously fast . . . so loud . . . like the music . . . so fast like the dreams of death valley.

Just what did they do for fun in the old cycle? How did they live without electronics and computer disc minds? she wondered. The automatic light went on and graceland welcomed her. The letterman was interviewing one of her dream buddies and Sonic was coming over to get his nails done. Sonic was a kindred spirit of hers. His center was his creative urges and Thunderheart could dig that. She was a woman and a man and a way-out free flow, and he, Sonic, liked to cross over gender borders like a coyote. Sonic took to wearing dresses a couple of months ago when he was watching the boob tube and saw the latest designs of menswear in Paris was skirts . . . he watched how the male models strutted down the walkways, trying to feel at ease in this new fashion fad, but they were sorely embarrassed. Sonic got to wondering, why not . . . and bought a few dresses at the L-Mart where Apostrophe worked, and he found it to be great fun and some of the styles actually flattered his tightrope form. Thunderheart found it amusing and let him borrow some of her hipper threads to wear to parties. Sonic had branched out and was trying make up and silk nightgowns.

Thunderheart used to be a guru . . . but didn't like it and retired from the scene. She didn't like the pedestal people tried to put her on, and didn't like the lifestyle. Being worshipped is not all it's cracked up to be. As many stereotypes as there are around being a "woman" or "man," the spiritual game is a horror house of demonic false purities and power bitchen plays. She just wanted to be left alone these days to draw, paint, sing . . . laugh and do anything that gave her happiness. If she was the Self, she reasoned she had the ultimate excuse to be SELFISH . . . it was working out pretty good. Hey, if you have to invent a new religion based on realizing the SELF, you might call it SELFISM or SELFISHISM. Imagining breaking up that creepy separate self sense, that urge in people that drives them to be victims of their own bodies' desiring . . . and then trying to convince them to stop kicking or pinching themselves . . . that if they just stopped hurting themselves they would find out the surprising truth that they are already free and happy . . . well, Thunderheart's imagination had carried her that far . . . no stuck persona for her, but the people she had tried liked the definitions of personality martyr. Yeah, they were attracted to what was beyond their little lives, but they were like tourists who were disgruntled at having to undergo any changes in food, dress, customs, to help them adjust to living in the new world. Still, she loved the peoples . . . the kid women and the kid men . . . and her love for them was also boom-a-dinging her to dropping the old forms and ways of the spiritual game. She just wouldn't compromise her playful, happy heart even to help people. Misery loves company . . . over and over again at the stuck point . . . the prayer of rigidity was not her mantra . . . She wanted to change in every second, to feel everything, but none of it stuck except for the sheer pleasure of the performance, whether it was tragedy or comedy or mediocrity.

The guru game was another business . . . she sold out before she went bankrupt. She quit her job on the board of gurus and sold her stock in the company to purchase a very fast get-away car. They were still pissed at her for getting out . . . especially Master La Booba . . . he was an old line company man. He liked submission, confession and strict obedience. He was a closet gay. She flaunted it . . . and we ain't talking about sex here. Genitals ain't shit when it comes to real pleasure, but the old country is full of superstitions like that . . . just no curiosity in the potato-digging fields. Can you dig what I'm trying to say? If you are free then you can find ecstasy in anything and nothing . . . the doing and the non-doing are all what's real, too. So Thunderheart had graduated her low-life students and was starting a new kind of design school on the high desert where no crap can grow. Fecal matter is okay . . . it's spiritual . . . but that mind shit has to go.

Apostrophe heard the good news . . . this definitely would change her life . . . no sex for sax . . . ditch the stupid job at L-Mart . . . study music . . . become a real, true artist—that was always her real love and ambition . . . she just played with dolls like any other girl 'til something with a little more than a plastic fantasy came along. She had been waiting for this so long, so thought it would never happen. Ding dong the witch was dead! How she had hated that woman . . . how Nora had tried to control and manipulate every aspect of her life. She always took it meekly and quietly, did what she or life presented to her. Nora had been horrified at the likes of Sonic. His gender bending was way beyond any kinship Nora had to "art." With the $20 million she would inherit, she could buy all the instruments she wanted and even fly Sonic to Paris for the fall line of men's "dressy" attire. Whoa! She was riding high and those ruby slippers were hers. There was a little of a flip side to it. Apostrophe felt a little twinge of guilt about feeling so happy about her mother's death. After all, this was the woman who birthed her . . . she owed her that . . . or did she? She always wondered if her conception . . . was a moment of loving passion between her parents or a splotch of red dust lust. She couldn't picture her mother doing it and enjoying it . . . worse than that she couldn't remember what her father had looked like. He died when she was three . . . it was suspected it was murder but Apost had a theory that it probably was suicide. All traces of him disappeared from the family albums. Life growing up was her and mommy dearest. Nora had ranted at her all through her childhood that she wasn't too bright and a dud in the looks department. "Sarah Beth" (her birth name) her mother would spout off, "you're just like your father! He didn't understand the proper order of things either!" Apost never knew what she meant by that until one day her mother made a slip revealing a clue about her father. "Your father and those . . . well . . . those people . . . they are not our kind . . . and now you and this man . . . I can't tell if he really is one wearing that feminine attire!

What Apostrophe didn't know and Thunderheart suspected was that her father was still alive and resided on an island in the South Pacific. Thunderheart was doing some research on the matter. There was just an uncanny resemblance . . . when she first met Apost she thought the dear kid woman was a female version of an old company guy . . . yeah . . . La Booba. La Booba never confided to Thunderheart about his previous life before he took the starring role as head corporate guy in the guru business. She had been looking under a musty rock here and there . . . old grave sites . . . and found a lot of far out tibits about La Booba's earlier life. Some of it was pretty weird stuff . . . even weirder than his earlier teaching days. Thunderheart didn't have any conclusive proof about the matter, just her instincts . . . Apost romanticized her dead absent father (so she thought he was dead), he was close to god in her mind . . . ah, the irony of the situation . . . to romanticize a dead father, to give him the fantasy of being wonderful . . . the answer to all your dreams . . . daddy who really loves you and will protect you from the bad men and their cruel world . . . what would it do to the poor girl to find out that he really is GOD!

How small the world of karmic destiny is. It's like riding the dodge-em cars . . . round and round . . . bumping into her and him again and again. Well, Thunderheart figured, I don't think it's the right timing yet that Apost is going to inherit more than just a pile of money one day. La Booba's students were not taking kindly to my indirect questions. It's a close knit group . . . they are suspecting that I am not submitted. Babes of BOOB'S you don't know how right you all are. There is no other to be submitted to . . . yeah, but no one ever gets that free flow. My intention is to help my kid woman friend, Apost, and all my hunches about her and La Booba . . . well, I don't see how it helps her. She is a dear freaky woman, capable of having many kid women and men herself . . . the final acts are coming up with her soul mates. She doesn't even suspect. Play on Apostrophe . . . your omitted letter is going to get through this time around.