Lance Olsen - Sewing Shut My Eyes

Mother’s Hunchbacked Reflection, Daydreaming

The dream won’t stop arriving. Every night. Running errands, too. In the evenings with Father & Uncle Billy & Panzer after dinner watching “The Donna Reed Show.” In the dream, there is a cobblestone town square. The sky is chilly gray. A crowd has gathered to watch six clowns perform. The clowns ride unicycles while doing handstands. Play an accordion with their feet. Juggle flaming bowling pins. The crowd applauds. Afterwards, the clowns move among the onlookers with a shabby tophat, collecting. When they reach a group of small children standing in front of their festive parents, they proffer the hat. The children, thinking the goods inside are theirs, plunge their hands in. One pulls out, not the spare change people have been depositing, but a white rabbit in wire-rimmed glasses. Everyone cheers. The clowns simper & proffer the children the hat again. Dazzled, the children thrust in their hands & this time one extracts a huge, colorful, paper-flower bouquet. The crowd erupts in admiration. When the clowns proffer the children the hat a third time, the children, giggling & sputtering with merriment, jab in their hands &, next, one is holding a giant glistening purple-red clitoris with wet floppy labia. The crowd, baffled, goes still. The children open their mouths to scream. But just then the giant sex bird begins flapping its fleshy wings, rising out of the astonished child’s palm, circling over the heads of the onlookers & then higher & higher over the town square, above the medieval rooftops, into the chilly gray sky, until it is a moist liver, until it is a black dot, until it is nothing at all.

Panzer Playing, Her Head a TV Set

I am the person who becomes you, like it or not. I am the person whom you can never become again. I am the person you can look at from the outside but never really understand. Knowing this cuts up your heart at least once every day, often when you least expect it, riding the subway home after work, opening the refrigerator door & reaching for a pint of ice cream. I am the person who recites the dreams my parents never had. I am the person who sticks so many thoughts into my uncle’s mind that his mind in the end becomes my mind. Because I had a sister who used to beat me, kick me off swings, clip my hair with gardening shears while I cried. Because my name isn’t Panzer. Because it never was. Because my father wouldn’t listen when I told him, over & over, & my mother said I’d have been a better person if I hadn’t been adopted. Because freaks are just like humans, only more so. Because one day when I was four, playing with my dolls in the family room, I somehow didn’t realize that 34 years later I would dream that I looked down at my arm & saw something slithering around underneath the skin, a little hard pea that reminded me of PacMan, & I began to scratch at it but it wouldn’t stop so I became terrified that beetles called the past were living in me subdermally, only then the skin over my right carpal tunnel unfolded like a fastforward orchid & a supernumerary clitoris surfaced & I gave it to my husband & he lay it on his tongue & played with it, nibbling & licking, for hours, & then he slipped it down his pants, & I grasped that everything was going to work out okay in the end.

I’m a, like, poet. Mona. Mona Sausalito. I write lyrics for my boyfriend’s band, Plato’s Deathmetal Tumors. Plato’s Deathmetal Tumors kicks butt. It’s one of the best Neogoth bands in Seattle. My boyfriend’s name is Mosh. Mosh shaved his head and tattooed it with rad circuitry patterns. He plays wicked cool lead and sings like Steve Tyler on amphetamines. Only that’s not his real name. His real name is Marvin Goldstein. But so. Like I say, I’m a poet. I write about human sacrifices, cannibalism, vampires, and stuff. Mosh loves my work. He says we’re all going to be famous some day. Only right now we’re not, which bites, cuz I’ve been writing for like almost ten months. These things take time, I guess. Except we need some, like, cash to get by from week to week? Which is why Mosh one day says take the job at Escort à la Mode. Why not? I say. Which I guess kind of brings me to my story.

See, I’m cruising Capitol Hill in one of the company’s black BMWs when my car-phone rings. Escort à la Mode’s a real high-class operation. Escortettes’ services go for $750 an hour. We usually work with foreign business types. Japs and ragheads mostly. Politicians, too. With 24 hours’ notice, we can also supply bogus daughters, brothers, and sons. You name it. Except there’s absolutely nothing kinky here. We don’t even kiss the clients. No way. Handshakes max. Take them out, show them the town, eat at a nice restaurant, listen to them yak, take them to a club, watch them try to dance, take them home. Period. We’re tour guides, like. Our goal is to make people feel interesting. Therma Payne — she’s my boss — Therma says our job is to “give good consort.” Therma’s a scream.

But so. Like I say, my car-phone rings. I answer. Dispatcher gives me an address, real chi-chi bookstore called Hard Covers down by the fish market. My client’s supposed to be this big-deal writer guy who’s reading there. Poet. Supposed to’ve been famous back in like the Pleistocene Error or something. So important I never even heard of him. But, hey. It’s work.

Now I’m not being like unmodest or anything, okay? But I happen to be fricking gorgeous. No shit. My skin’s real white. I dye my hair, which is short and spiked, shoe-polish black, then streak it with these little wisps of pink. Which picks up my Lancôme Corvette-red lipstick and long Estée Lauder Too-Good-To-Be-Natural black lashes. When I talk with a client, I’ll keep my eyes open real wide so I always look Winona-Ryder-surprised by what he’s saying. I’m 5’2”, and when I wear my Number Four black-knit body-dress and glossy black Mouche army boots I become every middle-aged man’s bad-little-girl wetdream. So I don’t just walk in to Hard Covers, okay? I kind of, what, sashay . Yeah. That’s it. Sashay . I’ve never been there before, and I’m frankly pretty fucking impressed. Place is just humongous . More a warehouse than a bookstore. Except that it’s all mahogany and bronze and dense carpeting. Health-food bar. Espresso counter. Dweeb with bat-wing ears playing muzak at the baby grand. Area off on the side with a podium and loads of chairs for the reading. Which is already filling. Standing room only. People are real excited. And books. God. Books. Enough books to make you instantly anxious you’ll never read them all, no way, no matter how hard you try, so you mind as well not.

I’m right on time. So I ask the guy at the register for the famous rich poet. He points to the storeroom. Warming up, he says. So I go on back and knock, only no one answers. I knock again. Nada. My meter’s running, and I figure I mind as well earn my paycheck, so I try the knob. Door’s unlocked. I open it, stick my head in, say hi. It’s pretty dark, all shadows and book cartons, and the room stretches on forever, and I’m already getting bored, so I enter and close the door behind me. When my eyes adjust a little, I make out a dim light way off in a distant corner. I start weaving toward it through the rows and rows of cartons. As I get closer, I can hear these voices. They sound kind of funny. Worried, like. Real fast and low. And then I see them. I see the whole thing.