(illustration by Richard C. Goertemiller)

‘If you study history I think it’s patently obvious that God is not going to intervene. That’s up to the people, that’s what the second coming is all about.’
Jane Lee Randall-From the Mountain Brook Interviews with Zen Burns

Chapter 1
I was ten years old the summer I sprouted my fairy wings but flight was impossible because it was also the summer my feet turned to concrete. Being a chubby child I was already an embarrassment to my mother, the Queen of Door Proper, so I’d learned early to dislike myself intensely and stay hidden in quiet shadow. The problem was my concrete feet made me noisy, my concrete feet made me visible, my concrete feet turned my mother, bi-polar on a good day, into a shrieking harridan. She shrieked day in, day out, and it was such an ugly sound blackbirds fell out the sky and people took to wearing sound-proof earmuffs made from recycled polyester.
My father, retired military and solution oriented, decided to chop off my feet. He strapped me down on top the potting table off the patio, said this will hurt me more than it hurts you and swung the axe up over his head. I closed my eyes, tried desperately to put myself to sleep, whenever I was scared I put myself to sleep, at which point my slut brother Elbert burst through the privet hedge hollering, ‘EA EA MORRIGAN!’ and threw an open box of rattlesnakes at him. Rattlesnakes hate to be boxed so they hit the ground in a biting mood. To this day the mental polaroid of my father jumping up and down, chopping at snake heads screaming for a gun fills me with subtle pleasure.
Mother shrieked on and after two months my father finally broke down and sent for my very rich Uncle Julian, my mother’s older, favorite brother. My father couldn’t stand my very rich Uncle Julian because he was a shrink, arrogant, over-educated, and liked nothing better than to talk about Joseph Beuys and the use of felt, fat and rabbit fur in art. As if all this wasn’t enough Uncle Julian lived in New York City and God had personally told my father that anyone who lived in New York City wasn’t right in the head. But it was a desperate time calling for desperate measures. My mother, whose beauty was so intense she was once named the eight wonder of the world, was turning into an ugly stinking toad woman. Everyday she was squatter, more bulbous, more inclined to hop the halls, and worst of all she knew it was happening.
“Someone must pay for this,” Uncle Julian said, watching the repetitive up on two legs, down on all fours, creepy forward motion of his screaming sister. “Whoever did this has to pay,” and my father agreed.
They got to drinking bourbon, then they got to shooting rattlesnakes, and then they got around to me. That’s when I learned that when men feel powerless they have to beat up on something weaker to feel powerful again. They left me with my feet but very little else.
Bat dark and jittery my slut brother Elbert speeding his brains out skimmed up Persian wrapped stairs like a skim boarder skims thin water, into the back attic where he stashed his marijuana and ludes. He saw a passed out, partial naked Uncle, he saw a passed out, partial naked father, he thought, ‘how fucking weird is this?’ Then he saw his chunky baby sister and pretty much lost it.
Elbert half-dragged, half-carried me out the house and down the driveway. He was sixteen and crying, ‘I can’t believe they did this, I can’t believe they did this, my God, my God, I can’t believe they did this! I remember the collared choking sound of the words, rivets of black mascara coursing down his chalk pale face, the coming green of the cypress trees lining the driveway. He landed me gentle on the cool seat of the grounds jeep but I would not let go of his neck.
“Let go sweetie,” he said, “I’m getting you out of here.”
I was blinking in and out spinning webs fantastic, far far away, I was so far.
“They’re no doors Elbert,” I said, sticking my arm out where the door should be.
“You’re fine baby sister, strapped in tight.”
The jeep went fast, the jeep jerked a hard stop. Stars shot out my forehead.
“Open the goddam gate,” Elbert hollered.
“Elbert there’s no roof,” I said peering up out my one eye still open.
Paul of Mourning the gate-keeper stood thick, legs apart arms across his chest
“I will kill you,” Elbert said real flat. A boy true to his word my brother, everybody knew that.
The gate queried punctured out, I dissolved into thick liquid color.
Quietude.

The Red Bus had fat wheels and the wheels shaped and shifted like bags of cats fighting to get out. That kind of lurching adaptability works well on the pockmarked roads that run through the Scrub but it’s pure undulated hell if you’re traveling as cargo. Elbert had packed me pretty tight but the crate itself was the sole occupant of the underbelly of the bus and much to its sawed delight had room to move. BANG! BUMP! BASH! “You’re too kind for this freak show,” Elbert had said pressing a kiss to my forehead. BASH! BANG! BUMP! He lowered the top, fit it just so, and started to hammer. In the black I smelled sparks and hot wood, the loud of it all made me scream but no one could hear. “Trust me baby sister,” he’d said.
Elbert blew up his first bank a little later in the day and I split in two. One half of me was the girl who’d grown up in my mother’s house, which some kindly, unseen force steamrolled into sleep, the other half was the girl becoming seen for the first time by my Uncle Gabriel when he pried open the crate with a crow-bar.
‘Hello beauty,’ he said. ‘The packing slip says you’re my niece.”
His voice was spun of river current, threaded through with kindness and when he reached out his hand I took it even though he looked to be a giant and a crazy man. His hair was brown, longish, shot through with gray, and stuck straight out and his eyes were piercing blue and wild like a caged tiger’s. He helped me out the crate, we were in the kitchen, and the tiny, tiny, toy-sized livestock started lowing, oinking and bleating. All I could think was oh my god I’m visible and I’ve shrunk his cows, goats, and sheep. I dove right back into the crate, tucked in tight, flattened out, and wrapped sheets of darkness around me. Uncle Gabe looked confused.
‘It’s okay Janie,’ he said, ‘nothing and no one is going to hurt you here.’
I didn’t say anything.
‘You come out when you want sweetheart,’ he said and with that he went about making dinner, talking to himself the entire time. It was a rousing conversation.
I waited till he went to bed.
Being blessed with night vision I could move round in the dark without bumping into things but my concrete feet made balancing difficult and silent, tip-toe, step out of the question. I clumped out the kitchen, waltzing arms to keep balance, lost it anyway, pitched forward into the living room and faces morphed out the walls and smiled breezes of love. I threaded fingers into rings of night, ready to bury under sheets of darkness, for what I knew of love was sharp, mean and for my own good, but that’s when the raccoon on the couch farted, surprising me so I completely forgot to be scared of the lavender, pale pink and silver gossamer hues nuzzling at me like little noses of nurture. It was wonderful, absolutely wonderful and I clumped, fell, clumped, back to the kitchen, made myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and got bit for the first time by one of the tiny, tiny, toy-sized, mean-tempered, black-fleeced sheep. It’s a stinging bite and it leaves a little red mark but the sheep only bite if they think they can get away with it….
______________________________________________________________________________

(everything i write is copyrighted and i am extremely litigious)

The mad monkey channels the truth of the ages but the monkey is mad. The people chase after the diamond earrings the star plucked from her ears and threw to the ground. “For effect,” she laughs and smiles violet-eyed.
(illustration by adam koford)

North Carolina, 1973

Tally comes into my room sucking her arm and tells me it tastes just like sugar.
“Taste my arm Jane Lee.”
“I don’t want to taste your arm Tally.”
“This is gonna be good for my diet. Whenever I want something sweet all I have to do is suck my arm.”
“I’ll suck your arm,” Mallory says. She’s my roommate and she’s lying in my bed.
“What’s wrong with your bed?” I ask.
“Yours smells better.”
She takes Tally’s arm and pulls it to her mouth. Larry sticks his little pink nose our from under the covers and wiggles his whiskers at me.
“Hey punkin,” I say.
He scurries across the bedspread and hops to the floor; I kneel and stick my arm out. He runs up my arm and cuddles on my shoulder. Larry is a white rat and belongs to Cheryl Lynn, my suitemate. Cheryl Lynn’s roommate, Marjorie Baer Brown, swears she’s going throw him down the garbage shoot and incinerate him but Cheryl Lynn told her she’d cut off all her hair while she was asleep if she did. Marjorie B. backed down as Cheryl Lynn is a little crazy and true to her word.
*******************
“Be like a mewing kitten, the Bhuddist at the bar tells me.
“Why?”
“God will pick you up.”
I mewed for forty-five minutes when the lamp turned into a big fat worm. God didn’t come so I had to tell the lamp I knew it was just a lamp and to leave me alone. My feet were dirty and I wanted them clean. Mew. Mew. Mew. I wanted Jesus to wash my feet with oil.
******************
Daryl takes the boa out the cage and drapes it around my shoulder. ‘”She’s very sweet,” he says. The snake and I were eyeball to eyeball, her little tongue poking featherlike against my check. I was fine till he fed her a live, white rat. The little rat was so scared. I didn’t want to watch, but I did, and there’s a strange thing that happens between hunter and prey. There’s the hunt and there’s the cornering and the prey knowing death is inevitable holds perfectly still and gives off a little shake, an almost imperceptible little shake, and that’s when the snake strikes. And just like that it’s over.
**************
Mallory and I are in bikinis catching the first rays of spring, scalpels in hand.
“That’s the aorta,” Mallory says, carefully opening the chest cavity of her fetal pig.
“My pig doesn’t have an aorta,” I say.
“Sure it does, it’s right there,” She point with her scalpel. “Use your finger Jane Lee to hold that flap of skin back.
“Mallory don’t you think it’s odd these pigs came in little plastic bags with home of the happy pig written on them?”
Cheryl Lynn drops down next to us pig bag and scalpel in hand. Her hair’s all sharp and spiky; she cut it short with cuticle scissors.
“Phil’s going out on a date with Millicent Boddee,” she says opening the pig bag. She sticks her nose in, sniffs, and lies the bag gently on the ground with a reassuring pat.
“What are you thinking Cheryl Lynn?” Mallory asks.
Cheryl Lynn leans forward and starts cleaning her toenails with the scalpel.
“I’m thinking when he’s walking up the steps of the parlor I’m gonna be on the balcony and drop a water balloon filled with sugar water on him. You know how fussy he is about his hair, he’s worsen a girl.”
“I’ll do it,” I say.
Cheryl studies me with her long narrow nut eyes. Most people’s eyes stop before they reach the side of her head, hers don’t.
“You should be sitting down on the front bench so he won’t think it’s you.”
“We gotta learn these pigs,” Mallory says.
“Poor little pigs,” Cheryl Lynn says softly, tenderly taking hers out the bag.

I did drop the sugar water balloon on Phil and Cheryl Lynn was sitting on the front bench watching. When he looked at her she flashed him a peace sign and hocked a loogie through it.
***************
Tally comes running into my room painted head to toe hot pink. She is naked save for white majorette boots.
“You gotta hide me from Miz Luke,” she says stepping delicate over Marjorie B. scrap-booking on the floor and quick into the closet, closing the door behind her. Miz Luke is the dorm mother; each dorm has a dorm mother we’re supposed to have tea with once a month. Not one of them is under seventy-five and the hazy memory of a gentler life that once was carries them edge free through the day.
“Girls,’ Miz Luke says opening the door.
“Hey Miz Luke,” we chorus. She dodders in. Larry pink nose peeks out from under the dust ruffle.
Mallory pats the space next to her on the bed. “You come here, sit next to me, I’ll make you some tea.”
Cheryl Lynn is sitting at the desk and staring out the window. She’s been sitting there catatonic for the better part of two hours. I am stoned and I hate seeing Miz Luke when I’m stoned because she reminds me of an old, porch cushion with loose stuffing and I feel mean when I think like that. She’s not quite all there in the head, Miz Luke, but she’s surely puffed with a mission on this evening.
“Girls did a naked pink girl run in here?”
“No Miz Luke!” “Oh my goodness no Miz Luke!” “A naked pink girl Miz Luke?”
Slight pause, that tight-wire moment of a lie getting over, Ms. Luke gives a little quiver.
“I saw her,” Cheryl Lynn says her tone flat lead ugly. “She ran right down the sidewalk with a monkey.”
I saw a child hit once, for no good reason, at the beach. Miz Luke’s face looked just like that child’s.
Marjorie B. was off the floor in a blink.
“Come on Miz Luke,” she slipped her arm around her waist, “I’ll help you look.” She shot Cheryl Lynn a look of purest hatred and eased Miz Luke out the door.
“That was close,” Tally says stepping out the closet. She picks up Mallory’s baton, twirls, tosses, turns, and catches it.
“Why are you pink?” Mallory asks.
“I was bored. You got anything to drink?”
Mallory unzips her pillow, pulls out a bottle of Jack.
Cheryl Lynn’s chair scrapes back.
“Where are you going?” Tally asks. She takes a slug of Jack, hands it to me.
Cheryl Lynn’s got long skinny crane legs but she walks stiff.
“To run up and down the stairs backwards,” she says and laughing like a maniac she stiff strides out the room.
“Did Phil knock her up?” Tally asks.
“Sounds like,” I say reaching for the bottle.
*****************
“We gotta get to the hospital,” Mallory says walking into my room. She tosses the keys to me. A light blue terry towel blood seeping through is wrapped round her arm.
“What happened?” I say catching the keys.
She unwraps the towel; her arm is bit clean to the bone. Tally runs in screaming, runs out still screaming. Screams are starting up and down the hall, a symphony of talcum powder screams. Mallory sighs.
“Cheryl Lynn,” she says. “She’s been eating blotter acid all day.”
Tally is running up and down the hall screaming, “Cheryl Lynn has barricaded herself in someone’s room and is destroying it, OMIGOD! OMIGOD!”
We file down the stairs through the rumors, she’s got a gun, she’s got a bomb, she’s got a hostage. An ambulance and a cop car pull up as we walk out of the dorm.
“Does it hurt?” I ask starting the car.
“I don’t know.” Mallory rests her head against the back of the seat and closes her eyes. “You wanna got to Chapel Hill after they finish stitching me up?”
“Kay.”
There’s a clump of run-down hippie houses back in the woods about five miles out of Chapel Hill and Kid and Cameron live in one of them. They’re happy to see us and a little stoned. We sit on the porch drinking beer and Mallory takes her bandage off so they can see the stitches. Kid follows me into the kitchen and I let his hands roam.
“There’s no comfort in it,” I say pushing him off.
“I want to show you something,” he says and taking my hand he leads me out the house and next door to Carl’s.
“Carl’s not here,” he says opening the door, “I’m taking care of things.”
The room is dark and smells rank, something chattering flies by my face, I jump. Kid flips on a light, a bare bulb in the middle of the ceiling floods the space with harsh white light. Roaches flee and the room looks like a hurricane hit.
“Man you made a mess of things,” Kid say to the little capuchin monkey, sitting upright on the back of the couch. The monkey spits and bares his teeth at us, jumps from couch to bookshelf to chair. He’s a blur he’s moving so fast running into things and knocking them over. He looses his footing on an open book and screaming he shoots up the side of the bookshelf and crouches there panting. Kid laughs.
“Carl got him from a smuggler,” he says. “Cool huh?”
I went outside and threw up and when I looked up at the sky the stars were twinkling like diamonds.
*******************
Cheryl Lynn’s mother is bustling around the room finishing up with the packing when Cheryl Lynn drifts out of the bathroom tranquilized into submission wearing a yellow chiffon dress.
“You look lovely darling,” her mother coos. “There’s nothing like a pretty girl in a new dress. Don’t you feel better wearing a new dress Jane Lee?”
“Yes mame.”
“I always feel better wearing a new dress. Now Cheryl Lynn honey I’m gonna go pull the car around and then I’ll be right back. When I went here this school had porters,” she says starting out the door, “it’s a terrible thing not having porters.” We listen to the sound of her heels tap-tap-tap further and further down the hall.
“You look right stupid in that dress Cheryl Lynn,” I say.
She laughs, takes a seat next to me on the bed and carefully arranges the folds of yellow chiffon around her.
“I like you Jane Lee,” she says all soft and dreamy.
“I like you to.”
We stare at the floor.
“You ever think of cutting yourself Jane Lee?”
“No.”
“You can see the scar when you cut yourself.”
“You shouldn’t be cutting yourself Cheryl Lynn.”
We stay quiet for a minute.
“I’m giving you Larry,” she says finally, “he likes you best.”
“Your mom won’t let you take him?”
“She’ll let me but I’m not gonna be home that long. They’re putting me away.” Cheryl Lynn looks at me, leans in close and grins, and just like that she’s as pointed and sharp as she ever was. “I’m only pretending to take the drugs the doctor gave me,” she whispers, “and I’m going to pretend my way through that place. Then I’m going to California, I’m going to the Promised Land Jane Lee.”
I helped her mother get her things downstairs. Cheryl Lynn was acting doped up again, swaying along singing softly, “my name is little buttercup, sweet little buttercup.” It was hard not to laugh; it was hard not to cry.
****************
“What’s in the box Marjorie B?” I ask. She jumps guilty-like, her hair rolled up in juice cans.
“Just trash,” she says picking up her pace. “I’m in a hurry Jane Lee, I gotta date coming.”
“You stop!” I holler.
She starts running, she’s through the door, but I shoulder her into the wall and beat her to the landing.
“Give it here,” I say blocking her way.
Two of the juice cans on Marjorie B’s head have come loose. Larry squeak-squeak-squeaks in terror, claws frantically at the inside of the box.
“Give it here,” I repeat.
“I WILL NOT!” she yells hugging the box tight to her and I grabbed onto her hair and yanked as hard as I could. She dropped the box but I was so mad I wouldn’t let go. She was screaming and hollering and carrying on telling me I was every bit as crazy as Cheryl Lynn. Mallory pulled me off her and when I wouldn’t calm down she smacked me hard across the face.
“Take a breath Jane Lee,” she said, and she held me close while I cried.

Dirk Rackintack, the Pulitzer Prize winning editor of the Door Gazette, wrote that Gabriel had been murdered and his boat torched by Satan worshippers, probably the same ones who mutilated Bugbee Hendershot’s sister-in-law’s cows, but everybody, dangerous disagreeable and god-fearer alike, knew it was space men who chopped up the cows. There were space men in Door all the time because of the quartz quarry, they used light through crystal to fly their ships, but like any group of beings they had their good and bad elements.
The peoples’ outraged response to Dirk’s story was so smack back fast they shut down the switchboard at the paper and the mayor’s office. Then the Old Women of Door, who loved truth beyond all reason, got into it.
‘What was done to Gabriel was evil,’ they thought, ‘and when you see evil like that you follow the money,‘ and at midnight they thought as One and they put the thought out there.
The thought spiraled and spun through Door Proper gilding azalea beds, tennis courts, and endless pools. The thought glazed the spokes of motorcycles, the lean to’s, and the sumac round Door Pond. The thought glimmered the sands and the salt marsh of the Scrub. The thought stuck like glue, the thought could not be scrubbed off, the thought could not be shook or buried, the thought upset and threatened. Dogs howled. Knots of people began to gather up and down Main Street, they gathered talking, talking, talking, amongst themselves and the talk turned heated, and the din of heated talk began to rise and leapfrog, and an issue issued forth. It was naked, a naked lie, and threatened everything it meant to be a Dorian. Gilbert quickly called a town meeting and typically, everybody came.
The Door meeting house was old pink stone, ivy covered and damp, home to centipedes in the basement, and historically plaqued, thanks to Jane Lee’s mother, Jancee, and the Pappagallo shod Door Proper League of Women. The building tended to shift right, left, up center and back down, to provide right and perfect ventilation for the standing room only populist debates and determinations for which Door was famous. That Door was famous for its populist debates and determinations was a direct result of Zen Burns and his documentaries. Zen could not get over the fact that life and the quality of life in Door was actually in the hands of the people, a responsibility the people took quite seriously. The only job of the elected official was to carry out the people’s will whether it ran contrary to his/her ambitions or not. This, as Zen was fond of saying, ‘knocked him out.’ This, as Zen was fond of saying, ‘blew his mind.’ This, as Zen was fond of saying, ‘had to be on film man.’
Because of the Burn’s Documentaries utopia seeking sociology, urban planning, and poli-sci students tended to gravitate towards Door as did hippies and commune people. Hippies and commune people would inevitably move down river to Tap Town as the people of Door were entirely too argumentative for them. The utopia-seeking students would generally flee after their first town meeting. Zen didn’t really capture the more vitriolic aspects of town meeting because like the students he tended to view Door through the lens of utopia. Door was proudly, persistently, and passionately diverse, a town of extreme opposites. Zen purposely edited out the not pretty push-pull of the opposites and in so doing he lost the point. The point of the push-pull, the vital and necessary clash of opposites intrinsic to the healthy growth of the whole. Zen saw the clash and thought ‘opposing,’ the people of Door saw the clash and thought ‘finding the balance.’ The point of the push-pull of a Door Town Meeting, the circle round the whole, of the whole, and for the whole, was the common good; what was best for all people, not just a select few. This was what Zen Burns fell in love with, a town’s unwavering commitment to what was best for all the people. This is what he glorified and glamorized in his documentaries, not the working reality, the push-pull (he lost the point), of what it takes to maintain such an unwavering commitment. Because Zen lost the point and his documentaries became famous, Door became an ideal to many of her population and the rest of the world, a double-edged sword indeed. Theoretically an ideal is flexible enough to expand, contact, evolve with the only constant that is change; realistically ideals become solid, unchanging things, a defining piece of identity, and depend on an unwavering denial of ever evolving reality. That which challenges group identity is more often than not judged a threat to perceived though not necessarily real safety. Swaddle an ideal, (Door is fair and just) and the components of the ideal, (we can trust what we read in our newspaper) round a naked issue (were we lied to) and the ideal, the identity (safety) of the individual and collective, is threatened. This was part of Julian’s I-can-make-people-believe-anything-I-want-them-to plan. That and outright lying. The point, however, of Julian’s plan remained to be seen and given the fact that Julian was not an idealist and adhered to the teachings of B.F. Skinner and his boxes, the point would surely not be lost…..

(Everything I write is copyrighted and I am extremely litigious)

posted at open salon 6/19/12