Part 7 (2/2)

I won a prize Like she had as a young woraphs and a drawing of a redbird my father made when they first met My photo was in the paper The day they took the picture et a haircut My et the newspaper the day the story was supposed to come out We sat in the car and stared at the picture of me and read the small story about the ”writers” who had won prizes My e of myself I lookedlike a woman I'd never met

The story I wrote was about a child who had witnessed a cri children The only other witness is a blind man on a bench The blind entle ether to help catch the pedophile When called upon by authorities to speak, because she is afraid, the child loses her voice But she is able to talk to the blind ether Each without a sense, they make a story that saves children The police find out that before the pedophile defiles the child, he whips them on the bare bottom with a belt The police are able to catch hie of the writing contest remarked on how mature my story content was

My mother and father took me out to dinner at the Brown Derby

We didn't talk We ate

It was the first story I ever wrote

About Hair and Skin THERE IS SOMETHING ABOUT HAIR AND SKIN

In a beautiful wooden box, I have the hair of people I love

I have my sister's My ohen I was a kid My son's My dead infant's alh school In college I have Kathy Acker's hair Ken Kesey's hair My first husband's hair The hair of a longtime woman lover - several different colors of it My second husband's hair My third husband's hair The hair of two of the dogs I owned The hair of cats The hair of- and this one is kind of randolish teacher - as over the top Christian - so I have Christian hair I have Buddhist hair I have atheist hair Gay hair, straight hair, the hair of a post-op tranny who used to be a Scientologist The hair of a white wolf Seriously

I have et the chance to own the hair of someone important to me, I leap forward a little too zealously

Ken Kesey's hair between your fingers feels like laine shapes in clouds - like the touch of dreams kids have when they look up into the sky

In anthropology the word fetiches was popularized by C de Brosses' Le Culte de Dieux Fetiches, which influenced the current spelling in English, and introduced the obsessive desire part

A nicey way to say it would be to say ”so irrationally revered”

Fetishi+sm in its psycho-sexual sense first cropped up in that swank sex writer's work, Havelock Ellis, around 1897 Have you read Havelock Ellis? Was that guy high or what?

Kathy Acker's hair is like blades of bleached grass - sharp and stiff - and s pools

It's not just hair

There's the hair, and it's true to this day if I meet someone with beautiful hair I want to put

Scars

I like to runthem like mouth Braille

Buddhist hair smells like smooth stones taken from a river Whereas Christian hair has a cross between new car smell, dollar bills, and after shave Alternately like chocolate chip cookies

There is a woht after I tell you about ets born

Mysix inches shorter than the other Incompletely different than it did in hers

In leam of her scar appeared exactly at eye level So white So beautiful I wanted to touch it Mouth it When she got out of the bath I hugged her leg and closed my eyes and saw it and saw it and saw it I saw the crossed white tracks, the too-white non-skin on her , the dark wire of her pubic hair It h to see stars

And that's not all Myspiral at the back of her head When she let it down, it reached her calves It smelled like fir trees

Every desire that flickered alive in es

My h to cover her body, her defor about her that was beautiful to cover a crippled girl

When I was 13 ent More and more she left the house More and s She cut her hair off in that 1970s real estate agent on the go way The long trail of her hair sat curled in a box like a cat in her bedroom closet Sometimes I would sit in the dark of her closet and smell it and cry

Harder ”NOW ASK ME FOR WHAT YOU WANT”

Maybe it was because I only saw her three tiene, Oregon Maybe it was her stature - so high up in the acade awarded a very important prize to be with her It could be it was that she liked my brutal and unruly stories Or that I had no place in her daily life Maybe it was her scar, her hair, httion I'll tell you right noasn't prepared for it I was being all grad student faux s and Benja the talk of Barbara Kruger and Roland Barthes andwho the fuck gives a shi+t Point being: I was not prepared to psychosexually regress fast enough and hard enough to make me leave a puddle in my seat

In the auditoriuh I was sitting fairly far from her, I could see that her silver and black hair traveled down the entire length of her back in a braided rope, past her ass The skin on her face and hands was the color of Albuquerque When she turned to face our jackastic applause, I saw so just underneath the infant thin skin of her left eye was a tiny white glea I had to strain to focus I had to sit up and lean forward on the edge of hts, only a podium lamp illuminated her face from below I saw then a web of thin white scars that curved around her cheekbone, cupped her jaw, and continued down her neck into the plunge of her shi+rt

I went instantaneously deaf I rapher talk It was like being underwater Occasionally I was able to wrestle my eyes away from her to look at the streao wrong in s Sweat fors My face got hot My scalp felt as if it was leaving my head My mouth filled with spit I wished everyone in the room dead

By the tih the idiotic acades, by the time I penetrated the clone army and reached my hand out to shake hers, to introducefor, I already knew

She was the sae as my mother

A few hands before h on her pant leg to create the beginning of ould be a stain when she got back to her hotel for the night A stain on the thigh of her pants froe of shahtly, as I recall Desperately thinking inside my skull don't be desperate don't be desperate don't be fucking desperate

When she looked atthe hands and faces of adoring ht, that's that, I'

Her hand in mine et Wet fro crohen you are etically alone in the world with your only beloved: a ca projections of anted her to be dripping from her hands Wet with the sweat of hundreds of numskulls just like me

I don't knohy I did it, I just know I couldn't not While I was holding her hand I leaned in close to her face and said my name is Lidia I am a writer Which I said exactly to the scar underneath her eye, letting o Her hair s like I was exactly like anyone

But it would not be the last time I touched her

I didn't know yet that desire cooes wherever it wants