ORANGE MESSIAHS by Scott A. Sonders (books to read this summer .txt) 📕

should make you a cinch for sainthood.”

James Dean looked chagrined but came back with, “Yeah, but I still need and want sex in unmentionable ways and in unmentionable quantities.”

I looked at Vicki. She looked back at me like an approving, proud parent. I grabbed her arm more tightly and with my free arm pushed James Dean’s hand off from Vicki’s shoulder. While steering us both in the other direction, I called over my shoulder and said to him, “Well, why don’t you try the queer bar on Santa Monica and Fairfax. They love assholes like you.”

I had a great time with Vicki at the party, even with the all the jerks, the huge crowd was... wait, here’s my new word for the day... galvanizing. James Dean was actually a positive experience. I’m learning to be more like Vicki. Or maybe I’m just learning to be myself. Vicki is, after all, an odd duck. A real mix of opposites. One minute she can be as cold and sharp as a new tack, and the next minute she’ll be as warm and poignant as an old mariachi love song.

I slept at her place after the party. We were both zonked out and she has a bed as big as my old bedroom. But before falling asleep, Vicki just sort of started talking, under her breath, into the darkness, as if to no one in particular. The oddness of her words surprised me. So it’s with those words that I’ll end tonight’s pages.
Vicki said, “I sort of hope you’re asleep because I’ve never told anyone this and I probably never should, but when I was a little girl I used to get really angry at my mother. She seems really terrific to people that don’t really know her. She’s elegant, beautiful and refined. But she’s not very nice as a mother. She once told me that if she’d never given birth to me, she’d have left my father and become a stewardess. She’d wanted to be a bird. She’d wanted to fly. Airplanes were as close to that as she could get. She said that her parents had expected her to get married and have a family. And she’d always done what was expected. I was what was expected. And I think she’s secretly hated me for it.”

Vicki sighed. I didn’t move. She said, “And I hated her back. I hated her for making my father miserable, for her taking any of the love that she didn’t deserve, love that should have rightfully been given to me. My mother never hit me. She never even raised her voice to me. Harsh words are beneath her. But it’s the silence between words that inflicts the most damage. Silence makes pain invisible. You cannot answer silence.”

Vicki sighed again. I imagined that her heavy breasts were making it difficult for her to inhale. Her voice slipped into a whisper. “I tried to answer her. I couldn’t. I became constipated from holding everything in. Sometimes I couldn’t go to the bathroom for days at a time. Then, once, when I did have to go, I crept upstairs to my parents bedroom and, when I was certain that no one was looking, I crawled into my mother’s closet, took down my panties and made a really huge poop inside her favorite shoes.”

I still didn’t answer.

Vicki said, “I wonder if it’s this weird for everyone? You know, look around. Just this year alone. First it was Charles Manson. Then a 6.6 earthquake in San Fernando. And now we’ve got Mariner going around Mars. Mars,” she sighed again, “I’d like to go to Mars. I’d like to go for a long cool swim in a Martian canal. I bet it’s beautiful on Mars.”

There was a long emptiness before she spoke again. I had heard her breath even out. And just when I thought she’d fallen asleep, I heard her turn her head on her pillow. From the sound of it, I knew she was facing me. I felt her reach her arm out and rest it in the curve of my waist where it flows into my hip. In that moment, I knew that I really knew her. She was like a Mallomar, a tough cookie exterior shielding a soft and sweet marshmallow interior.


In a whisper she started singing a few bars from the Led Zeppelin album. It was a song that I was well familiar with. It had been the theme of my high school graduating class. The school band played it, along with Pomp and Circumstance, at our commencement ceremony. And those words were scrawled on the jacket of our yearbook: “...and she’s buy-ing a stair-way to hea-ven.” Then she broke off, sighed deeply and said, “You know Ramona, I’m so tired of being surrounded by hopelessness on one side and by arrogance on the other.”


December 19th:

Thank God it’s Friday. Going to a party on Humpday and staying out until two A.M. took a lot out of me. I’m not going to write much tonight because I’m doing this just after coming from therapy after work. Carlos is coming over at 7:30. We’re going to get something at the Hamburger Hamlet in Brentwood then shoot over to the Bruin on Gayley Avenue for the ten o’clock movie. He wants to see the new Stanley Kubrick film, “A Clockwork Orange.” Carlos thinks Kubrick is in the divinity category somewhere between John Lennon and Bob Dylan.

It’s been three years since we went with some friends to the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood to see “2001: A Space Odyssey.” That’s the coolest movie theater, plush seats and a huge screen. We’d each dropped half a tab of Purple Owsley before the flick. Owsley is the purest LSD made, not cut with speed or anything. One of my friends, in fact, it was Donna’s little sister, Elvia, got so blitzed on the acid that she ran up to the movie screen with about five or six other people and started caressing it, moaning, “It’s God. It’s God.”

Anyway, I’ve only got an hour before he gets here, so I’m just going to transcribe something that Diane Rosen, my therapist, told me to do. She said it was important for me to ask my mother for something that she’s written down. Something she’s never shared with me or anyone. Then I’m supposed to read it and record it. In this way, I can connect my mother with myself.

I went out of my way after the session to stop at Mama’s and ask her for that “something.” She usually tries to be a bit stoic but I think she was touched. She gave me some things she’d written only for herself, just after Donna committed suicide.

I never knew that my mother ever wrote anything, yet alone poetry. It makes me feel even closer to her, if that’s possible. So, if my Emily Dickinson fantasy ever comes true and my journal gets published posthumously, my mother’s work will also be recorded for posterity. I think it’s good stuff, so with no more chat from me, here’s it is:


1. Untitled

I can still hear the ashes speak of Donna and how she burned, her eyes circled by darkness, her thighs clenching the life that she gave in death. She had yearned for love and a daddy to hold in her room filled with broken dolls and torn dresses.

And from the smoke the ashes speak again, confessing how they
worshipped the taste of fire that came to claim the smell of Donna’s skin.

Smoke cannot be contained. It can only speak the truth, lest we forget that the smell of fire comes only from what it burns.

2. Untitled

In the fall, when the leaves had prepared a soft bed for the blanket of coming rain, I quietly shed my 33 years like the trees their leaves and a lizard her skin. I’d felt the change coming. I’d transformed into a recorder of events, an historian, a person in process.

My 30th year had been the spring when I’d flowered again, four children had left me still strong yet graceful and lushly colored. The next few years were my summer, and my words fell onto paper like hidden Indian spice.

But now a chill crawls beneath my skin. After all, are not the seasons inevitable? I contemplate the eventual winter, still and heavy, like frozen typewriter keys. I button the collar of my denim jacket. I tie my red scarf more tightly and try to think about the Resurrection. I sit in our backyard on a low stone wall circling a now empty fountain. Images of water lilies that once floated here. Images of fish in a frozen lake.

The history of Donna is only a quarter turn from my own. Her death has eroded me. I feel I cannot write anything anymore.
I feel I have become ordinary.


3. Untitled

A little girl would sometimes lie in her darkened bedroom and imagine a spacecraft hovering outside her window. Waiting. Watching.

She imagined she would be abducted. Not for something unspeakable like the things that often lurked beneath the floorboards, but for something special. She was afraid but hopeful. Greatness was near.

But the years brought constant trial. Perhaps she was to be chosen Only after having been proven. She was consumed by curiosity.

She found refuge and solace in libraries, at church, at school,
in the plaza of the city. She also found excitement on the edge
of things, in imagination, in the faces of handsome men.

She crossed many rivers. She had a child. She lost a child. She fought with polio. She defeated polio. She had a boy. He was taken to prison.

She prayed. He was returned.

She listened as the voice of a kindred soul,
just fifteen, died in despair. The magic began to lose its color.
The paint of surprise began to peel. The plaster of adventure
began to shrink and crumble into predictability. The closed curtains began to yellow and sag.
She had been a swimmer. A potential medalist. Her small frame had been a sharp knife in soft water. But even swimming had become a lesson in pain.

She began to dog-paddle. To tread water. She needed to keep her nose dry. She thought, now and again, about the spacecraft.
The friendly aliens. She thought about the Book of Daniel.
She listened for the sisters of mercy. She prayed every day
for Salvation. For Resurrection. None of them came.


4. HEROINE

I was captured by Gypsies and lived
in many places before the age of five. I could perform
wonders with sleight of hand and was skilled
in magic while yet eleven.

I was savvy in song and a political prisoner when a friend
committed suicide to celebrate seventeen.

I was a cabalist and a guru, a perfect
master and a metaphysical
wizard before I drew twenty-two.

And then I broke the chains of sin
and crime and escaped
the slavery of space and time and found
God again at twenty-nine.

I am thirty-three now and dangerous.
Jesus became Christ at thirty-three.
Follow me and you risk becoming a burning apostle.

If you were meant to be / a Gypsy or a Lord
you would have known / long ago.•

December 20th

It’s Sunday night.