Not sure I ever posted the story, but here it is. I had to write a story about what I felt about "my art", and this is what came out. The story kind of reminds me of the movie, "All That Jazz". To the Bob Fosse character, death was a knockout blonde with major T&A swinging on a swing in a diaphanous gown.

Art is Scary

I left home for the first time when I was nineteen. Mom and dad said I needed to go to Smith, but I persuaded them that what I really needed was to take a year off from school. They reluctantly agreed. I knew they were worried but I also knew they would never say so. It wasn’t that I hated my home or anything like that, I had a great relationship with my parents. I just wanted to see things, do things, see and do wild and crazy things and home definitely was not the place to do it. Actually I think the only reason my parents let me go at all, was the fact that I was going to stay with Aunt Sally or Aunt Bhakti as she liked to be called in San Francisco.

San Francisco to me was a really happening place. I mean, you know, old hippies, gay people, computer nerds and every kind of freak imaginable. And Aunt Bhakti, she was really cool. She was always sending me great presents like my incense burner and my little Buddha with the blue hair. Dad said she was an old hippie from the 60’s who never got over the Vietnam War and men with long hair, but she was also mom’s younger sister and very rich. They had to let me go, Aunt Bhakti was family after all. So off I went to San Francisco. Aunt Bhakti lived in a drafty old Victorian house on Cole Street, full of artwork, books, plants and cats. I had my own room, my own house key and keys to one of Aunt Bhakti’s car, a 1962 peach coloured MG in mint condition. I loved that car. I was in that car when I met Art.

Art was my first real grown up boyfriend. He was older than me, 29 and beautiful. He sort of looked like Jack Nicholson only younger. I met Art when I was stopped in traffic. I had been sitting in my car for ten minutes when he walked up to me. He looked great; he was in a dark navy pinstriped suit wearing a tie with turquoise and white horizontal stripes. He gave me this really corny line like "I’ve never done this king of thing before, I mean walking to a complete stranger and saying this, but would you like to go out sometime?" I was thinking yeah right, but he was really cute and there something about his Mediterranean blue eyes that was interesting and dark, really dark. So I found myself saying, "Sure, what are you doing now, want to go dinner when the traffic clears. By the way, my name is Melissa." Art smiled, and hopped in. That was the start of our relationship. Art and I never did anything except take drugs and have sex.

Art had lots of inherited money that he managed through his stockbroker. Art’s most rewarding quality was this talent he had for being able to look at any drug and tell you what it was for, how much to take to get high and how to mix it with alcohol and other drugs to get even higher. I’ve never met anyone since with that kind of gift. We did a lot of drugs together and it was a blast until morning. Most of the time, I’d wake up in the morning completely strung out, but not Art. He had great tolerance. He’d wake up at the crack of dawn, turn on the TV on and watch the stock market report. Sometimes I joined him but I would get dizzy watching the tickertapes go by and go back to bed.

I remember this one night Art and I had taken 4 grams of mushroom each. We had also been drinking cocktails earlier so we were really tripping. Art had a balcony with a fabulous view of the Bay Bridge. I had a fear of heights, and since his apartment was 12 stories up, I had never gone out on the balcony. Art went out on the balcony that night and made me go with him.

That was Art, he was really cool, but he scared me sometimes when I was with him. Art always made me go places that I was afraid to go, but he kept saying facing the fear was the fun part, living on the edge was what really mattered in life. He kept begging me to join him on the balcony. The best thing about taking mushrooms is you get a body buzz. You feel really great, almost giddy, you feel ready to do anything, and so I went.

I looked around. It was so beautiful and not as frightening as I thought it would be. Art grabbed my hand and took me towards the edge of the balcony. I suddenly had this thought that I would like really like living on the edge like Art and the thought was freaking me out, but I went with him anyway. Art was seductive to me and he knew it. We got to the edge and we both looked down. It was like looking down into a pool; I wanted to dive in. I was mesmerized; part of me wanted to jump, a big part. Art was standing next to me and holding my hand. Did he know what I was thinking? I wondered. He seemed to. I looked into his eyes and he smiled and said, "Looks inviting, doesn’t it?" I smiled back and looked down again. It seemed like we stood there for a long time, looking down, looking into each other’s eyes, and then looking down again. Lover’s suicide pact scenes were playing in my head. It all seemed so incredibly romantic somehow.

Art leaned over to look down further and accidentally knocked his beer glass over. It fell and although I couldn’t see or hear it, I imagined it smashing down on the street below and breaking into a thousand pieces. Then through a psilocyben haze, I saw myself falling and smashing on the street like the glass. I couldn’t tell if this was real, I felt no pain. I must have died because I saw myself looking down on my lifeless body. I felt sad, I was dead and now I had left my body. I felt tears in my eyes coming out and I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t.

All of sudden, I saw these little beings crawling out from my body. They were small and looked like diaper clad babies but they were walking. I didn’t know what they were, maybe they were toxins coming out, it was a weird scene. And they were carrying things. I looked closer at them. One baby being was carrying a book. I looked at the book title and it was the name of the book I had told myself I would write one day "Tall, White and from Detroit". How strange I thought? The baby being was carrying one of my dreams and desires. I saw another baby being carrying my Easter Bunny with feet with bunny faces that dad had bought me when I was seven. I loved that Bunny. I kept him because he had brought me so many good memories. The baby being was taking my childhood memories. Something inside me snapped at that point.

I jerked my head up. I was alone on the balcony. I looked around and saw Art. He had gone back inside and was sitting on the couch watching TV. I went back inside, into the bedroom and lay down, I needed to sleep. I knew Art wouldn’t mind. He would eventually pass out watching TV. I didn’t think I would be able to sleep, but I passed out quickly.

I woke up very early the next morning. Art was in bed next to me sleeping soundly. I put on my clothes, wrote a note for Art, kissed him on the cheek and left. I got in my car and went home. Aunt Bhakti was up, as usual, watering her plants. I sat down and told her I wanted to go home. Nothing ever surprised Aunt Bhakti. She smiled and said I’ll call your folks and book you a flight so you can be home tonight. I got up and hugged her. I knew she never really liked Art and I think she was secretly glad I was going home. On the flight home, I kept wondering if my room was going to be the same. Mom always has always cleaned and rearranged my room when I was away at camp. I had been gone for nine months. I was praying as hard as I could that mom hadn’t done anything to my room. I made promises to God, prayed to my blue haired Buddha, prayed to every god and guru I had ever heard of for my room to be the same.

That night when I got home and entered my room, I almost screamed in relief. My room looked exactly the same. Everything was exactly where I left it. I put my stuff down and sat on my bed. I saw my Easter bunny with the bunny-faced feet sitting on my bookshelf. I was glad to be home.

This is fun news. Someone just emailed me wanting to know if it would be okay for her use my performance monolugue piece - "Art is Scary" for a reading at her drama class.

Oh my god, how incredibly flattering! Of course, I said yes and good luck. I asked her to tell me how her reading went as well, because I'm curious as to how her class will react.

I got lots of laughs and applause when I performed it, and everyone said I did really well. It's weird to perform something you've actually written, instead of someone else's piece. How often as an actor do you get the chance to ever do that?

Here's some surprising news. That job I thought I flubbed and lost is now in process again. They called me back today for another interview for tomorrow to meet my future boss' senior manager. Apparently they've been crazily preparing for a meeting like I have, and were too busy to call.

I wasn't going to go because I'm way too busy, but I really want to meet my potential future boss who is based in Los Angeles and is here for the week. I mentioned something about working tonight after Ash Wednesday service, and she asked me if there was a catholic church near downtown where Enlglish is spoken. I told her to go to Old St. Mary's Catholic Church which is within walking distance of downtown and Union Square, but emailed her the links anyway for a couple of downtown catholic churches.

I don't think I've ever had a boss who went to church. I've met people at work who went to church, but I've never reported to someone who actually attended church regularly.

For my SciFi, Fantasy and Horror Writing class, I have to email my instructor 350 words of "daily fiction" every day until the end of the seminar. He said it can be anything we want, a fiction piece, a good rant, whatever.

So I started idea # 2, a novel tentatively titled "The Dwarf who Heard Voices".

It's a first draft without editing or corrections, just whatever is in my head. So beware!

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At night I hear the voices; always they speak. Not loud enough to hear very well, and yet not soft enough to be ignored. But enough to where I hear their murmurings on the edge of my consciousness and I see their grotesque images chanting evil words in my dreams.

When I first heard the sounds, I thought it was a radio or a television turned on too loud in one of the other houses. They built the houses here so close together with shoddy thin walls that you know when dinner is over at night because burping noises echo like bells through the neighborhood. But the sounds came late at night and we had a strictly enforced noise rule starting at 10 pm, so I knew it wasn’t one of my neighbors. And even if it were, I knew someone else would complain about it first and the noise would stop. But it didn’t.

I tried not to listen, tried not hear, even going so far as to walk around with earplugs or stereo headphones. But still I heard the sounds. So I had to listen to them, I was forced. And the more I listened, the more I became aware that the sounds were voices and that they were not dwarf made, or human made, or any other creature for that matter. No creature of this world could have spoken with those voices. And then the dreams started.

Those horrible dreams of misshapen dwarves who looked like they’d been wadded up like a piece of paper and then half straightened out again, always standing in a circle and chanting, droning on and on night after night. Standing in the middle of the circle was an outline of a human male figure with no distinguishable features, looking like a shadow but with bulk and form. He stood there waving his black arms and at least once every dream; one of the deformed dwarves would step into the inner circle and disappear. But not without a flash of the malformed dwarf’s life replayed in the dream. It was the flashes of life that I came to fear the most.
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