Go Go, Super Sex Tractor Beam Power!

“They say the sun is sometimes eclipsed by the moon / You know I don’t see you when [he] walks in the room” - U2

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I was standing on the roof in my nightdress looking for the moon.

And I was leaning way out – way, way out, even – out over the edge on my hands and knees, tendons I don’t have names for sticking all out of my craned neck at strange angles, I suppose.  I can’t really vouch for the tendons, you see, because I did not have a photograph of the incident in question.  Much in the same way I don’t own a nightdress, in fact, but it sounded so poetic, I used the image anyway. Just a moment ago. Right there.

I know, I know: Just stop, right?  I think I said it myself, not so long ago.

Never did find that moon. But everybody deserves a night off once in a long while, don’t you think?

Half your basic British pop bands of the 1960s are nothing but watered-down versions of the Beatles, just like your Coldplay is a more presentable Radiohead.  Coldplay’s Chris Martin is Thom Yorke sans the crazy eye and cum Gwyneth Paltrow.  A Thom Yorke you can bring home to Mom and Dad.

And it was either Plato or else it was Deepak Chopra who used to talk about this theory of forms. About how both the king’s throne and that broken wooden rocking chair out by the curb partake in something called “chair-ness,” but maybe to different degrees.  I admit I always reckoned Plato (or Deepak Chopra) was just full of shit until this week.

That was when I spotted the pile of rags, while I was hanging out over the edge of my roof in my imaginary nightdress. It was just outside my back door, and it was hairier than your typical pile of rags.

Unlike most piles of rags, it also had a set of bongo drums. So it had that going for it, I guess.

My boyfriend, Greg, had showed me his elder brother’s business card when he told me about the impending visit, and the card said, “AWOL:  Itinerant Human Being.”  “AWOL” was what people called Greg’s brother, or the people who knew him, anyway. “Itinerant Human” was, I surmised, a euphemism for “homeless person.”

And Jakob Dylan is a fifth rate John Cougar Mellencamp is a fifth rate Bruce Springsteen is a fifth rate Bob Dylan began as a second rate Woody Guthrie.

Well, so much for the moon. I climbed in the window.  I walked down the stairs. I opened the back door and said to the pile of rags, all matter-of-fact-like, “AWOL, I presume?”

I said, “You haven’t by any chance seen the moon hanging around out here, have you?”

Bill Clinton contains but a pale sliver of John-Kennedy-ness, despite what he’d have you believe. Britney Spears is a poor man’s Madonna is a poor man’s Marilyn Monroe.

The pile of rags shook itself off and…

…straightened its bongo drums (on a strap around its neck, natch) and…

…and…

…gave off a burst of pheromones…

…and then hauled me in with its tractor beam.

“Adri at last,” the AWOL thing spoke, sweeping in to hug me, I think, but I crumpled into a pile on the ground before the move had reached the point of becoming a full-fledged hug.  It failed in its hug-ness.  I wasn’t accustomed to the pull of that Super Sex Tractor Beam, so it couldn’t be helped.

“Ya’kay, A?”  the thing asked, reaching in to help me to my feet.

I waved him off. “Yeah… just’a… football... injury… knee, bum…”

When AWOL wrapped its arm around my shoulders to help me inside, the eggs in my ovaries all went sunny side up. The air all around got sucked into somewhere.  My eyes dilated to pupil all the way around to the optic nerve.

“Inside on come …you …soon here be will Greg, called me he said.”  Or something like that.

Darker, broader, smellier, this AWOL creature was a purer Greg. It was something primal that hadn’t limped through law school and fittings for suits and hair stylists and, you know… shoes and stuff.

Greg was an AWOL packaged for mass consumption! 

Why had I not been made aware?

The Super Sex Tractor Beam had my panties halfway down by now, and only by sheer force of will did they manage to stay up.  

As AWOL set me into the chair, his shirt was pulled up his stomach a bit and there was little AWOL – okay, the other AWOL, we’ll say, not so little, really – peeking up very attentively at me over his waistline from inside the worn hemp pants. 

Normally that would seem inordinately creepy, you know?

Almost all of your modern female indie artists are cast as more marketable Patti Smiths or Kate Bushes.  I suppose they get to choose which way to go, although they’ll have to choose one or the other, and if they choose Patti Smith, the sandpaper gets hauled out for those rough edges.

And no one can be avant garde composer John Cage, no matter how hard they try. 

The pure, unadulterated thing itself could kill a man.  Of any thing.

“Upstairs go to have I,” I shook my head around, trying to acclimatize myself to the room as if for the very first time.  “Home at yourself make… ¿Ya will, time have you if, moon the find can you if see?”

Then I walked into a wall.

By the time I managed to get myself under the coldest water my shower could manage, Greg arrived.  He spoke through the shower curtain. I think most of it was probably in English.   The sounds included various vaguely English-sounding phrases.

Part of it might have been a question.  Perhaps “What do you think of AWOL?”  I say that because it sounds like something that could logically be asked, under the given circumstances.

Me:      “You were right about him. Certain raw, animalistic quality… um…”

Greg:    “Good Lord, Adri, did you sleep with him when he got here?”

Me, from shower:      “Not yet, but he probably shouldn’t stay very long.  At all.  And you might want to keep him away from my friends.  The girls AND the guys.”

Having been in the same room with AWOL for nearly 45 seconds, I considered whether I ought to take a pregnancy test. Greg was a domesticated, hormone-pumped piglet in a corporate corral compared to AWOL’s giant, deadly wild boar. A junior high trumpet player to AWOL’s Miles Davis.

Me:      “You should probably get into the shower with me now.”

Greg:    “Right now?”

Me:      “Either that or send your brother up.”

Greg:    “He’s my brother, Adri, jeez. Is this how you are with new guys?”

Me:      “You know me.  A real slut.  Don’t let my largely sexless half decade nun-like phase fool you.  Actually, I only seem to have this problem around you and your immediate family.  Is this as cold as the water can get?”

Greg:    “Well, calm down, he’s only going to be here until Monday morning.”

I write to you now from within my bedroom closet, padlocked from both the inside and outside. Release requires two keys turned simultaneously, one on either side. The letter containing a map to the location of the keys is due to arrive for Greg on Tuesday afternoon.

Even with all these precautions, I’ve clawed halfway through the door.

I can hear the moon outside my window, laughing its moony ass off.

I don’t stand a chance.