A good example of this occurred when I took CT home for Thanksgiving and Sis extended her hand to him.
“Mother of my love-cub, I greet you,” he said, and softly licked her face. After this display of vulnerability Sis’s vibes were very tight and secluded. The corners of her mouth tucked themselves firmly in like hotel bed sheets.
CT and I prefer to sleep outdoors but sometimes we’re forced to stay in really nice hotels. It’s all Management. If it were up to CT we’d just find a field close to our next venue and sleep there, but Management makes some good points: privacy, etc. CT’s nightly rituals, which are not exclusionary of nudity and spiritual vision accelerators for communication with the Worm Eternal, can be wrongly interpreted by people like the authorities.
Grog, the bassist, uses humor to mask his negative thinking when he agrees with the Management about hotels. He says things like “How can I round up babes for bonefests and take them to the middle of a corn field? The hottest babes with the biggest milkbags will not go for this. They want open bars and heart-shaped beds. Such are the desires of those with giant milkbags.” Then he’ll pause, adding, “I can’t believe you sleep in the buff where it is all wild and shit. What if a snake bit your johnson?”
Now Sister gives a loud gasp. She always talks so quickly that what she says seems urgent and true. It is some kind of trick. “You’re on nearly every television station right now! I called you because I need to talk to you about something serious, and now there’s this drama. Do you ever stop to think about how your actions affect others? I mean what if angels get one day to peek down to earth from Heaven and Tuesday was the one day Mom had for all eternity to check up on us and our lives? When she opened the clouds she would’ve been greeted with your… your spectacle.” Sister begins crying.
I know from experience that her tears aren’t clear; they’re a strange gray color like weird steam. I always figured they were mixing with her makeup until I realized she didn’t wear any (not to be commercialized but she could use it. Pastel, bare minerals). Her face is kind of gray too because she never goes outside; she fears nature like it’s a rapist or murderer, even though it’s so the opposite—nature is what’s getting raped and murdered! But despite not having sun damage she got wrinkles before her time from watching constant news television and subconsciously reproducing Dan Rather’s facial expressions.
Sister likes to pull back the curtains of her windows then stare out of them and look up at the sky suspiciously.
“What did you want to talk about? Do you need some money?” Of late, Sister has been plagued with a variety of fiscal obligations, something about back taxes. “Listen, Sis, I do understand what you’re saying.” I peek behind my shoulder and watch CT—naked, gentle CT, pink grapefruit juices dripping down his body like cartoon sweat—pretend to plug the blowhole of the dolphin on television with a slice of his grapefruit. His giggles are like heartbeats: steady and seconds apart. “But you just have to realize that we’re on different planes of existence. I’m not saying I’m better than you, just that my path is way more open with lots of colors.”
Sister’s weeping intensifies. “What the hell are you talking about?” she asks. “You’re speaking the drug-talk. I want Claudia back and I want her in English.”
If the spasm that afflicts my back and spine at the mention of my old name “Claudia” could make a sound, a single note, it would be unharmonious beyond this dimension. No one would even be able to hear what a wonky note it would be, because the human ear is not advanced enough. It’s one of those things; the sound is made but does anyone hear it? Was it made? I speak but Sister does not hear me. Do I speak?
“Uuuuuuuhhhhhhhhmmnnnngg.” CT lets out a guttural moan to begin his a.m. bowel gyrations. His torso bounces up and down while his hips move like he’s using an invisible hula-hoop.
His is a hula-hoop made of enchantment. It’s built of understanding, spiritual experience, and opium ether, paired with a variety of other things the human eye cannot see and the human ear cannot hear. Most of our senses are completely inadequate and not to be trusted; our true feelings come from our wormholes, often described as “the heart in our stomach between our legs.”
“Think about it,” CT likes to say, “The organ that the wormless refer to as ‘heart’ is like, entirely muscle. Like a body-builder or a worker bee. If bees have muscles.”
Sister does not affect my wormhole, but her disapproval makes my pulse quite irregular.
“Sister,” I say firmly, “Claudia is dead.”
Sis wails. I feel like I am some sort of hostage negotiator, except Sister is both the hostage and the captor. “We’ve been over this. My name is now Sorcerella Van Crystal. It’s official; I have stationary. Our bathrooms are filled with SVC embroidered towels. You used them to wipe the perspiration from your forehead the last and only time you visited our tree house. Please don’t backpedal. You’ve chosen to remain in my journey, thus my life.”
When Sister is really upset she begins to salivate. Her harsh words shoot out at me through the phone: sleds of anger luging down a hateful mountain. And the thing with mountains is, the higher their altitude, the lower their boiling point.
“Don’t give me this Sorcerella crap, Claudia. Jesus. The court fines I paid when you lived with me during high school. That guy who set your car on fire in our driveway. After everything we’ve been through, some ooga-booga rock weirdo can come along and brainwash you just like that?”
Sister is not receptive to meditative breathing exercises so I decide to suggest something a little more hands-on for her anxiety. “Sister, if I send you some special brownies, will you eat them?”
CT passes by with the walking stick and gives me the thumbs-up, meaning he’s embarking on a defecation-stroll. I wave goodbye. Perhaps sensing my tension, he jiggles his dingy slightly.
“Sweet earth for my loveworm,” he shouts, “I shall return.” Several flies are enjoying the streaks of grapefruit juice that ran down his chest and pooled in his groin and thighs. As he walks past me there is a loud unified buzzing; it is so cosmic, all those individual flies but just one buzz. It strikes me that it’s like my feelings for Sister—all the different harsh emotions could come out in one unified primal scream. I emit this into the receiver once I feel CT has ventured far enough on his defecation stroll that he will not hear me and fear danger has struck my physical person. CT and I do not like to use toilets-we only do this when we have to, like in super-posh hotels and backstage on television programs and concert tours. Sometimes the super posh hotels have double toilets and then he and I sit on them together, stare at each other, and try to predetermine when the other will flush, thereby flushing at the same time without ever looking away from one another’s eyes or communicating a will to do so. We have gotten very, drastically close to simultaneously flushing on more than one occasion. I’m pretty sure complete synchronicity is nigh the next time we are at the Plaza.
“You blew my ear out. I’m hanging up.”
Sister does not understand that her ears are already worthless. Their multiple defects predated my scream by decades.
“Sis, if I want to ingest the most powerful hallucinogen the Worm Eternal has provided to earthlings and copulate with my soul mate beneath the desert stars, that is my business and my right.”
“The balcony of your Vegas hotel suite is not the desert! Do you know how many photos there are of you plastered everywhere, how many videos? How is continuous sex for that long even possible? Did police really have to break into your room?”