I consult one day a week at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, where I’m helping to transform the Garden’s website into a fully accessible, standards-compliant, almost-too-sexy-to-believe juggernaut. It’s fun.
A few months ago, my Garden colleagues tied me down and forced me asked me to write an article for their newsletter, which is read by gardeners the world ‘round. Knowing next to nothing about plants and even less about gardens, I wrote about what I know: oatmeal.
I’m trying to find information about a story I once read about the Hindu god Krishna. The way I remember it, Krishna has sex one night with fifty thousand women. He does this by dividing himself into fifty thousand selves. With each woman he makes love in the manner she most desires—this being something he knows without asking.
I believe that the action takes place by a river; however I’m not convinced that I have the correct number of women, nor the correct god, nor even the correct religion. I’ve tried looking it up on Google, without success.
It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that I made up this story in a dream and have forgotten having done so, or that it’s a real story I really read once, only I’ve changed it beyond searchable recognition. I do such things all the time. In posting this note today, I am hoping that one of my kind readers will recognize the story and come to my aid.
On a related note, I wish to thank the many women who took the time to tell me, some in great detail, about their cramps. I now know more about cramps than I ever dreamed possible.
I remember a coat she had that was enormous. That was the style of the coat; it was designed to look three or four sizes too big. Whenever she wore it, I thought of the suit David Byrne wears in Stop Making Sense. He comes out with that look of his—bug-eyed, the long neck, very clean-seeming—and he’s wearing a suit with shoulders much wider than any person’s shoulders could possibly be. That’s what she looked like in her coat, except in her case the coat made her seem smaller, whereas David Bryne tottered about in his suit like a well-scrubbed giant.
My one memory of her wearing the coat is from the lobby of her building, the one across from the park. She’s facing me with her back to the elevators, and I’m standing four or five strides away, in the middle of the mailbox area. She’s never looked more beautiful than this, lost in her ridiculous coat, but for some reason I’m keeping my distance.
Also it seems that we’re talking, that we’re standing a certain distance apart and talking. Could we have parted and started talking again? My sense rather is that I’ve just arrived; I’ve just arrived and we’re talking, and for some reason I’ve drifted over to the mailbox area.
Why am I standing so far from her?
If I could have but one object, it would be my glasses. Without them, I’m helpless.
The “sphere” of my left eye is -8.75. This means that I see at 10 feet what a perfect-sighted person sees at 87.5 feet. To put this in perspective, without my glasses I can’t make out the top letter on an eye chart.
I broke my glasses when I was 17, and for some forgotten reason (this seems insane today) insisted on going to my job at Roy Rogers. On the way there, I walked into a metal pole. It was the pole of a No Parking sign. I simply walked into it.
Later that day, while scooping French fries, I saw a brown shape dart past my foot.
“A mouse!” I cried.
It was a hamburger bun.
It happens in one of two ways. Either things start and I choose to leave my glasses on, or (and this is a scenario you didn’t consider) things are in the middle and I decide to put them back on, having previously removed them. The former case rarely elicits a comment; the latter case never fails to, and, as you guessed, such comments are often about the woman feeling looked at.
But what’s so bad about being looking at? I am scanning her face for signs of the pleasure she feels. With my glasses off, I can’t see this; or at least not while on the bottom, which is where I usually am when I think, in the middle, of reaching for my glasses.
Of course I realize that the gaze of another can feel strange, that it can bring one back to a self one would prefer, at such times, to forget. Sex is, in one ideal, a temporary abandonment, even an obliteration, of self. For this reason, when asked, I will always oblige, no questions asked, and remove my glasses.
Cramps, if you really must know, are painful. They hurt, like the lining of a major organ was ripping away and this tissue and the associated blood was being forced out of your body through various narrow apertures. No one wraps this combo up in airbags. No one at Cornell wraps some gauze around a human skull and drops it down a towering stairwell*. No, it’s not that easy. The only relief is when a man’s hand is placed flat on the lower belly just above the pubes. Or during pregnancy when this doesn’t take place at all, but a host of other complications do (see Bounce). This cramps thing is more than just the pain, but let’s not get into that either. Every 28 days or so it begins again. The first day, not so bad. Day two and three very bad, then a cessation, a resumption, and the trickle. This has been going on for more than 30 years in my body. And strangely enough it’s going on right now, like in a blue moon, twice in this calendar month: Spirit arrived January 1st; Opportunity the 26th. Yes, it’s day three.
*Fog of War reference (not very well incorporated)
—Alisa
So many curses to discuss.
I gave a reading Sunday which felt like the opposite: a blessing. I love these readings more than anything, save for really great sex. My list of favorite things would go:
I’m sure you understand what I’m talking about because you’re an actor and have probably experienced it hundreds of times. Yesterday while reading, everything slowed down and I knew I could bring the audience to the exact place I wanted. It’s an extraordinary feeling of freedom and in a sense obliteration. The usual me—the me who is writing to you now—is gone. Gone, I mean, but not missing. It’s like he never was.
The more I think about it, the more this seems like really great sex.
So that eliminates favorite thing #2.
But back to curses. I appreciate your account of cramps. I’ve always wondered what they are like, and will wonder forever. I told my girlfriend yesterday that I wished we could switch genitals once in a while, just for fun. She agreed. Naturally I realize that men can be penetrated, but what I really want is a vagina. In particular I want her vagina, and I want her to have my penis.
The other idea would be to really be her, and have her be me. But that’s weird because if I were her, would I be her or would I be me inside her?
You see, what I want is to feel what she feels, but how I can feel that without actually being her? And if I’m her, where am I in the experience? It doesn’t seem like I’m there.
A man signs a shovel and so he digs.
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