ROBIN MAGOWAN
to the god that lives in this house? (How can that be? Is he
all right?). Yeah sure i call it nothing but the blues.
* * *
How much can one person do against
a
houseful of spirits?
When I
am
very special, i belong; now floating by, now thru
your house, the clinging
Li
lights, fire thru the trees. The
Japanese person crouches
a
smile, eyes under the sprinkling
can, out over the hill.
* * *
235
The answer in other words might have been a more sustained
closeness . Even at home I was never sufficiently with her. Everybody
in the revolution had his role, Ling announced, and mine was to go
on being one of the hundred flowers. Since nothing could have suited
me more-or her little stars of approval flecked here and there in a
notebook's silence-I was oblivious when she took off to make a few
bucks actressing in a nude movie (can one imagine a cast all shiveringly
squatting in a cabin, stoned on acid, in a weekend 's rigid, rain–
driven silence?). Ling was always hitchhiking somewhere, to the
Finnish Bath or the jazz club on Davisadero, trying to secure the
drugs , the cocaine that would be her means of wrapping me to her;
or more actually keeping her hand in against the day when the
bottom in me would finally drop out. "When a woman's down and
out she can always take to her back ," I remember her once in total
misery telling me . But I see the various porno gigs , the dope
couriering, the stint as a Russian River topless blackjack dealer, as
female equivalents of my own lower-class dream of being an itinerant
athlete-the body as its own sufficient passport . Not what one would
call a secure relationship .
I think now that Ling and I suffered from a similar need for
excess , which we confused with imagination . In me it was verbal,
and its traces must linger in what I'm attempting to describe . In Ling
it took the form of political anarchism. To some extent this was a
response to a reality that had us all pinned , choking, in our seats.
We were a state minority , and we were to be tortured by a Reagan
expressly elected for that purpose. Still there is some question to what
