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KISSED BY

FC2

Contents

Kissed By..........................................................15The Mystery of Which Mystery.......................................23Lynette, Your Uniqueness...........................................45ELENA=AGAIN........................................................47Round-Trip Blues...................................................63Potatoes, You Ask..................................................65all kinds of people on the Q train.................................69B. & G. & I........................................................81Two Alphabets......................................................99Kant Get Enough....................................................103Why I'm Jealous....................................................111Who Writes This Shit?!.............................................115Composer and I.....................................................135They Come From Mars................................................139Please Compose Your Photographs More Carefully.....................145So What Elapses?...................................................147Toward a Grammar of Guilt..........................................163Seven Indexes

Chapter One

I began as we all do, by wanting something, but I hardly knew what. I began by wanting somebody, nobody, everybody to know that I wanted something, but I hardly knew which. I considered all the others that had ever been drawn or withdrawn from life, like me. There was, among them, a little bird. It flew around the inside of an airport. Elsewhere, even farther from the frame, there was an alcoholic white woman waiting for a wedding ceremony to end. There was one first kiss, or should I say two? How many kisses are there in a first kiss?

I began as all we sketches do by wanting something or someone made up. But there's no such thing.

I was begun by an artist so abstract or minimalist or simply wrong-minded that I HAVE NO FACE.

In the beginning, I wanted to be by a painter who has three easels going at once, each on another wall, like Roz in her studio in the Bowery with one small pastel and two big paintings in various stages of existence so that when she comes to the temporary end of one of the oils, when in her mind its maroon of the moment has been exhausted, she can turn to the right, pick up the pastel fresh and apply the curves she just began to know it needed when she was up to her wrists in red a minute before and a quarter-turn ago.

Like the witch in The Patchwork Girl of Oz, who stirs all four pots at once, one with each limb. But constantly. Can you see her now, wooden spoons with long handles, handles tied with rags to her forearms and shins, two rags around each stirring part, wound double tight? Head drooping with fatigue, straw hanging wearily from her pointy noggin, oh so tired, still she stirs.

Like Moira Shearer trapped in The Red Shoes whose bad magic consists in compelling their wearer to dance. But forever. Ceaseless pirouette, vertiginous arabesque. A night, a spinning fortnight, an unearthly long time, until she dances down to the station, out on the tracks, and under a train.

So I turned to my scarlet artist and begged and begged for words and birds and weddings. Unbelievably, she agreed to a few strokes. But she is a brute and leaves me faceless. She gives me leave to stray because I'm not too hard to find. She lets me drive a car, but when I pull up at a stoplight, the drivers in the cars stopped around me look away or look again with horror. If she's not careful, I will cause an accident and if she is careful, I will cause an accident. And when and when and how and how will I ever get my kiss?

I might take an epic journey which I might begin by stumbling through Gate 22 and onto a flight to a faraway place to watch my sister follow a pink flower child down the aisle and into the curving arms of a fearsome man. I might see my mother lurch to the dance floor to do the Funky Tradition, hours after I do has been said and seconds after my sister has taken her last happy twirl. I might spirit away the flower child and we might head eternally for the tangerine on the horizon as it eludes us west and west again.

But that would be an easy out-too watercolor, too insipid for my painter. She would have me faceless fodder. She is terrible.

I begged again for the concrete. She taunted me: Wood a paintbrush do, souring in turpentine? Wood a very long-handled spoon?

Wood this unfinished block at the tip of toe shoes do? Wood you rather your sister walked some pirate plank and fell into the Dead Red Sea? She laughs while I rack up splinters in my unfisted hands.

So I dropped by Roz's studio, hunched like the headless horseman to protect the fine-feathered figure in the lobby. I rang once, I rang twice. Either Roz had the music up too high or she had herself up too high. Or maybe she was home in bed kissing as long as she knew it would take the vermilion of the day before to dry. What is the color of one Roz kissing.

What are two weeks spent spilling out of ruby slippers as against a lifetime of sneaking around without a face? Why can't I hot-air-balloon it out of town instead of facing: the earnest east, its early-to-bed-early-to-rise philosophy of life; the music without mercy; the plain fact that a griddle can spit better than I can? Why does she paint me into the corner of complaint, smiling all the while? She, she has and does and says it all.

About all I can really say for myself ? Caucasian. Beyond that, it's a blur. All I can really say is, it hurts, but not in my eyes or nose or mouth. All I can say is, I could go on forever. All I can finally say is, I would throw myself under the crimson canvas for just two plummy kisses.

Chapter Two

Some elements I want in my story:

I would like seduction without commitment; dubious intentions; groundless, but nonetheless debilitating, doubt. Of course, they've been done before.

I'm considering children separated from their parents, having been abandoned, abducted, left temporarily in someone's care, or having wandered away-in any event, the parent, the pivot point of consciousness, somehow suddenly gone.

I'm thinking of Leo, thinking of Lise. Maybe you'd like to know what I think they think.

I'll need the laundromat, the department store, the riverbank, the amusement park, the bus terminal, and maybe the train station, places where grownups can vanish. Watch with me while Leo wonders, as he has done so many times before, why his mother picked the laundromat, of all places, to take off from. The one of the above that most seems to promise a return. When the coins are spent and the cycle done. A blue whale is beached on the wall. Why did she work it out so that Leo would spend forty-five minutes without any doubt that she would come back to put the clothes in the dryer, without the slightest hint that she might not be back to scoop them, warm and dry, another hour after that, into the big canvas sack, to take them, and him, home together? In retrospect, Leo thanks her for those forty-five minutes. At the time, Leo put the wet wash in the dryer by himself, and fed it money, still without wondering. The blue whale blew bubbles. In retrospect, Leo can see that it was strange that she had left him three quarters, as though she meant to leave him...