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Thomas Centolella - MisteriosoThe more people I know and the more I know people
the more frightening they become. Everyone
has been damaged to near extinction. Everyone
has loved inordinately those they should not have loved
except in the most disembodied spirit of good will.
And everyone has been loved at some time or another
be the wrong people, or for the wrong reasons, or for reasons
that at the time seemed suspect, insubstantial.
And who hasn't been at the mercy of circumstance:
born under a bad sign, born with bad genes, or just born,
period. Timing is everything and some will never be
the right person in the right place at the right time,
no matter how hard or how long they try. Period.
When I carried these black winter thoughts from work
and got two blocks from home, I knew something
was wrong: a darkness literally fallen on Mission Dolores,
streetlights out, traffic lights out, the corner stores and the bookstores,
the movie theater and the café, all closed up. It threw me
back into the old New Age notion that we create our own reality.
I quickly started thanking my lucky stars, as if their small light
would suffice, as if merely the idea would click on
at least one lightbulb again. Of course, it didn't happen.
Doing the dishes by candlelight in a cold house, the steam
warmed me by degrees and I recalled Katrina, my first California love,
telling me that when her ex-husband came over for dinner
he didn't mind at all doing the dishes, unlike me.
He was a conga player and the hot water kept his hands warm.
The other thing Katrina said that I'll never forget
is that she would love me for an eternity, in whatever form.
It took less than a year for the veil to fall from that sweet illusion.
There was a man who readily agreed to be compensation
for all Katrina felt she lacked. He'd been after her since her married days,
she wanted desperately to be married again, I wasn't moving
fast enough, and that was the beginning of the end.
Five years since I've heard a word from her.
We are ghosts to each other now. Period.
Suddenly the power came on, the lights, the radio with Thelonious Monk
soloing on his "Misterioso," and I blew out the candle on the sink
though its radiance, pale yellow and flickering, had made the kitchen gloom
a cave of companionable meditation, like the grotto in St. John's
when I was too young to be disappointed by the mysteries
of the Church. The votive candles would cast deep shadows
in the Madonna's mantle, but she stood resolutely on top of the world,
the evil serpent crushed underfoot. One day after school, praying
for all the souls lost in limbo, I stared for hours
at her flawless face. Stared until convinced she smiled at me
for my devotion; I was young enough to believe she knew I cared.
I blew out the kitchen candle and Monk was playing all the wrong notes
beautifully, in that adroit, mischievous way that had made Katrina laugh
when she introduced me to his quirky syncopations, and saw
the bemusement they put on my face. Solo finished, Thelonious call out
for "Coltrane! Coltrane!" and his tenor sax took over,and it threw me
back to the bay window in our high bedroom, the international
orange of the Golden Gate Bridge in the far distance, and closer
the gold onion domes of the Russian Orthodox Church, made more golden
by the sun going down: a scene like a picture postcard of the absolute.
The last time a blackout hit, I was standing at the corner
of 24th and Castro, waiting for a bus with Rita and Theresa.
When the lights went out it was like one stage set being struck
to make room for another. Twin Peaks appeared as the silhouette
of a young woman's breasts against the more-visible-than-usual
constellations, and we walked to nearby Finnegan's, all dark wood
and candlelight, where Theresa introduced me to Jameson
shot by shot. I hardly knew Theresa but I liked her
because her hair was dark and silky and down to her hip,
and because in the power outage the city had been made less
a repository of systemized repression, and she wondered aloud
why more people didn't recognize they were animals.
Life was a matter of basic drives - appetites - and simple pleasures
profoundly gratifying, but we'd wandered far afield
of the elemental delight. It looked as if the electric buses
would be down for some time, and fog was rolling in cold,
so we went for a hot soak in Elisa's little local spa,
and Noe Valley seemed more a village than a neighborhood
and this unexpected darkness our true element, familiar,
inviting, like the steaming wooden tub we sank into
without clothes or self-consciousness, and which Rita, sighing,
referred to as a welcome return to the womb.
I finished the dishes and St. Thelonious Monk rejoined St. John Coltrane
and I decided I could be thoroughly annihilated by all the pain
other had acquired before they met me and eventually
visited upon me, if I let them. And as I cleared the counter
I thought of Peggy-O, who relied on household chores to ground her -
Zen work, she called it - and Leslie, who when her heart was broken
did a lot of scrubbing around the house, snozzled on White Russians
and called me at one in the morning "just to hear a human voice."
And I burrowed through the famous interminable strata
of papers on my desk, fancying myself an archeologist on a dig
in the quest for order and clarity, moving toward that fabled city
whose fragments once recovered and reassembled
would bear with startling relevance on the present moment.
And the thought of other allies came to me, like Kathy
who when love had brought me to a bad end, again,
insisted I go on looking, insisted I "go for the one with the legs
and the sense of humor," thus becoming my Guardian Angel of Leggy Wit,
and I thought of Alberto, my alter-ego, who once confessed
"A stiff cock has no conscience," and I thought how heedless
people seem to be of their power to affect other people,
almost as if they didn't trust the exalting, exultant
influence their attention is capable of inspiring
in the kinds of lives that are like one long blackout.
And when I managed to reach the final layer of debris on my desk
I found a quote from Rumi fresh as the day I taped it there.
"Why waste your time with those who don't know you?"
It was a question with the teeth of a guard dog,
with the vicious bite of truth. knowing the truth
might set you free, but after that it's a daily fight
to stay that way. Next to Rumi's quote was a yellowing
piece of irony, an old flame's note that said
"You've entered places in me that have no exits."
I thought of the transmigration of souls- from one body
to another- and how far certain ones had crossed over
my border, as if seeking in me a permanent resting place.
Their reluctance to go further, to go deeper,
had been unfathomable at the time- and had banished them
to history, to the incorporeal, to the limbo of mere memory.
Once, they were so pitiably human I'd had the impulse
to protect them from every darkness, foreseeable or not,
including myself. But they were spectral figures now, hungry ghosts
tracking their dirt through the house, helping themselves
to my dinner table and easy chair, to my favorite side of the bed.
And somewhere far inside me, haunted as well as haunting, they still
nuzzled the household creatures that were stand-ins for themselves
or the children they yearned for. And still trembled at the despicable parents
who'd appear suddenly in my stern features. And after their bodies
had been profoundly touched- though they were far beyond my reach-
they still wept: in old pain, or ecstasy, or gratitude, or fear.
For a moment, I felt a surge again of something close
to compassion, an overload to blow the circuits of the ego.
I felt tempted to weep with them in a fit of reconciliation.
And more: I wanted again to rally their lost causes
in spite of what was lost between us, to front a new initiative,
to come out on the side of jazz and other joyful noises,
to endorse good Irish booze and animal pleasure, to revive
the hot whispers and holy cries turned cold as stone,
like names inscribed to mark a grave. I was annoyed
at having been annoyed earlier at the temporary loss
of power and light- it seemed unworthy of the faithless
I had wanted to save, including myself- and for a moment
I had to laugh: hadn't I died too along the way, vacated
whatever it is that makes life worth the trouble, abandoned
my body to its hapless agenda? I don't know how
we get taken out of ourselves, or how we get returned,
but I was back now. Back to being human, back to the old dream
of accepting the timely disclosures of love,
or what in my time has passed for love.
Even if the truth love brings can often be ruthless.