The Defiant Ones

The hunger was sated as I slowly swallowed my saliva despite the saliently salacious sentence that slithered into the microphone causing an infernal feedback across the first five rows. My desire to delve into feigned genius and salad day dressing, were done, I thought as sweat rolled off in relentless beads atop the small of my back. She writhed in her chair, scintillating and seething as a few of her disheveled grey locks came undone, and nodded, and dug her left heel into the crimson carpet, she silently mouthed the word, “ No.” Camille’s jejune fantasies of her golden literary cow were quickly dissipating in a dreadful huff and a forceful puff. Her bony, seventy-two year old finger pointed right at me and with a sharp hawk-squinted eye, she conveyed the crucial importance of me rectifying my performance. A cough erupted in the middle of the room, somebody’s cellphone buzzed, keys were sought after in a purse, a clearing of the throat, a sniffing of a runny nose, a twisted ambivalence in a cheap bookstore chair…and there I was, in my sunglasses and my cheap moth-eaten suit, looking into the crowd of bourgeoisie cunts. They wanted the writer, the madman, the tough, little orphan child all grown up—bareknuckled and fisted-ready, fucking Fay and Fury alike…the defiant one driven by the devil, the wordsmith wanderer…

 

And then I heard a steady drum, as is always the drum I hear that no one else can. Then a tambourine gently shaking back and forth joining in, and I pictured the shimmery sequined dress of Marilyn Monroe bouncing on that glorious behind as Anton LaVey levitated unto the dance floor with his sexy black magic; Both brutally beautiful and bruising the fabric of reality under disco ball lights and fog machine madness.

Palaces Of Montezuma…Sympathy For The Devil…

 

I bowed my head and thought of all of them dead: Mr. Cash like black marble dressed in black; JFK’s face covered in Monroe’s negligee; Miles Davis dreaming and blowing through the mouth of decay; The Lizard King with his Mojo Rising; Wolfgang ripping through them limb by limb; The King writhing pruriently at the pelvis…

 

With my hands behind my back and my chin pointing straight ahead I said, “ You motherfuckers ready for this?”

∞