Blinded by the Light
Chapter 1: No Hand Basket Required
Bristly black legs of foot-long tarantulas crawling over your naked body. In a locked room. Forever. That was the personal vision of hell of my best friend in high school. The unrelenting boredom of absolutely no sensory stimuli throughout eternity might be someone else’s Hades. My own version of hell would include Ron Jeremy, long hypodermic needles, and a looping soundtrack of the Oz munchkins. I’ll spare you further details.
As I raised my living room blinds on this mid-June morning, I knew that whatever Club Med of Misery lay beyond, it had a reservation with my name on it. What else could await someone who spent her morning nibbling apple butter on whole wheat, sipping Kona blend, and hoping for a murder?
Soft drizzle dappled the picture window. June is one of the few months when San Diego gets variation in weather, usually in the form of a heavy fog we call June gloom. This morning the weather was like an ADD woman at a shoe store. It tried on this; it tried on that; fog mists here; sunshine and sprinkles there. Nothing seemed to please for more than a moment. Suddenly, an angled shaft of sunlight lanced through the room.
Since my thoughts were already on hell, I was reminded of Lucifer -- the Morning Star, the bearer of Light. I’d probably get to know him personally after wishing for murder. I didn’t really want anyone specific to be killed, certainly not anyone I cared for. But in the real world, the Big Bad Wolf prowls. People do get murdered. And if it was going to happen anyway, I wanted to be tangential to the act, involved somehow in bringing to justice those who took human life. Synchronicity had enmeshed me in two murders already, and I was jonesing for the next adrenaline rush. My thrill thirst may have had something to do with the fact that my romantic and professional lives weren’t exactly hot skittles at the moment.
As I stood there, a magnanimous rainbow shimmered across my living room floor, and danced along the Guatemalan rug. If a rainbow could dance, so could I! In fact, I could tango. I put the Frida soundtrack in the stereo and turned up the volume.
My housemate, Lana Maki, and I enjoy dancing together. Back before Jesus spoke to a president about the righteousness of invading sovereign nations, back when W 43 was just the coked-up scion of an ex-CIA Director, we’d danced a different dance together –the Great Dance that inspires all others. Lana was fey, Finnish, and feminine. And I fell. Hard. After dabbling in the lifestyle for a few years, Lana met a poet-boxer at her credit union one day, and soon made a withdrawal from my bed to his. Their relationship proved more haiku than epic, but it ended our affair. Since then we’ve lived together as housemates, moving through our lives with comfortable complementarity and a half-smile of things remembered.
The tango partner in my mind was Lana. The tango partner in my arms was an oversized bed pillow that never missed a beat. Step, glide, stomp! I snapped my head around to the beat. My pulse pranced and strutted along with the music -- a giro here; a barrida there. All I needed was a rose between my teeth.
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