Updated 2 years ago
Life is drama. Life is conflict. The darkness and violence of stormy relationships make you feel alive… the sturm und drang is almost as addictive as a hot rail of Ketamine.
A hyperrational, analytical, drug addicted brain machine man, who thought he could have it all, could not contain the female fury of the earth mother.
I first met Liza Steranko (not her real name) at some Burning Man party in Brooklyn. She had blonde dreads and had gone to Rhode Island School of Design, where she remembered JFK Jr. who went to nearby Brown. Her motto was “Babylon Will Fall,” New York being Babylon. She styled herself as some sort of latter-day Cassandra and 9/11 apparently proved her correct. She also loved the Rainbow Gathering.
Her father was an emigre nuclear engineer. Her Russian grandmother was the instructor for the Nutcracker ballet in New York. She was, in retrospect, one of the few, old school gentile Russians that had been here for decades, before the mostly Jewish influx after 1990. She ran in art circles and was with Basquiat right before he died. I later wondered if maybe she had convinced Basquiat that there Really Was No Hope.
We hooked up at someone’s house. Then, we ran into each other three times in three different places on the subway, which is odd considering it’s New York. The odds of that, combined with her very mystical way of looking at fate and coincidences, gave me my “in,” a chance to see her regularly.
Liza was beautiful and smart. She was reluctant, but I became smitten. I think she finally broke when she saw me cry after “I smoked DMT” in a squat in Tribeca where I was staying, and sat me through a harrowing six month period where I lost almost everything and almost went to prison for 25 years, but that is another story for another time. The next story I will write, in fact.
She lived with her retired father, out in Jackson Heights, Queens, and I would go there every Sunday and listen to her talk about all this psychic stuff for hours. Although we were both in our 30s, she made me sneak so her father wouldn’t find out. I found out later she had lied and was actually 4-5 years older than me (no big deal to me really, but when she finally thrust her driver’s license at me, it was like she was admitting to murder) She also revealed much later she had once drunkenly assaulted her father once and had gone to jail, of which I didn’t make anything. At the time.
She didn’t work and was on government assistance. I didn’t care about any of this, I got over my legal troubles and got a good job at a magazine and loved her and hoped to settle down with her. I helped her out a little, getting her a DVD player and a lot of punk rock music.
She said she couldn’t drink alcohol, but when we went to a get together at British Max’s, she drank heavily. This was the first sign that things were a little amiss. She began to drink often, and unfortunately, it unhinged her. Of course, her discovery that I sold LSD at parties, the remainder of what I had after the infamous 2000 Kansas Missile Silo Bust, was all cumulatively a little depressing to me as all this was beginning to not look like the Ozzie & Harriet 1950’s married couples ideal.
If what Dostoevsky said was true, that all happy families are alike, and all miserable families are all miserable in their own unique little ways, then we were headed for a cataclysm.
It also didn’t help that I was regularly in a K-Hole, communing with the galactic intelligence, one time even shooting up ketamine in the laundromat near her house. I still distinctly remember the feeling of the washing machine sounds morphing my physical body into a cosmic vortex, her disembodied Wizard of Oz head floating up in the astral sky 800 yards above me, calling me back to her plane of existence.
But we stuck together. After the Silo acid ran out, I branched out to ayahuasca. One weekend we went camping with friends and everyone helped me cut up the vines and roots and I made a kettle of ayahuasca over the campfire. I was the synthetic “shaman.” I had a little outfit that I had assembled for another event, a Lord of the Rings inspired orc shaman, and I had a drum:
We drank at sundown. The brew was strong. I walked slowly around the fire beating the drum and went through the verbal cues I had learned after first drinking ayahuasca at a ceremony years before at the Long Island estate of an heir to the Marantz speakers fortune, held by a Peruvian shaman for Terence McKenna and his friends, who died right before the ritual. In that initial experience, I had felt a medusa made of green locusts surrounding me with her snakes, wrapping her legs around me, raping me. In retrospect, that medusa looked an awful lot like Liza. I was a bit fey myself, so I always was attracted to strong women.
I wanted a full experience for my people, so my brew had a tiny touch of datura in it – elder shamans give it to younger, more inexperienced shamans to show them humility. I had field-tested it before – I knew what a stong datura trip was like – visions of horned wolves made out of vapourous super glue, horns sprouting everywhere, witches “flying” by rubbing the oil on their broomstick handles and inserted it into their vaginas – and the datura in this batch was a very minor, musty note in a fragrant bouquet of mimosa hostilis and peganum harmala.
Anyway, it worked. Although everyone else clung on, repeating we WILL survive! Liza had a hard time with her ego being demolished. She panicked and started saying we were all gonna die. I took her into a tent to calm her, not wanting to alarm the others, yet also not wanting to show favoritism to “the shaman’s girlfriend…” but they understood.
Inside the tent, laying down with her, I told her simply to pretend like the spirits she saw weren’t trying to hurt her, but help her. Immediately she slowed her breathing, then laughed. She said she saw a cartoonish wolf (! – the same imagery I had from before!) that was smiling and doing a little dance for her. So once the spirits were met and made peace with, everything mellowed after that, and after about four or five hours, it was done.
Sometime later, one day at the Lunatarium, emboldened with a red cup of liquid courage, she told off Burning Man‘s founder, Larry Harvey:
One night at Limelight, an Episcopal church in Chelsea that had been converted into a nightclub, she brought permanent black paint and proceeded to throw it at people, yelling “Babylon Will Fall.” The promoter had to pay someone whose fur was ruined.
Some nights she gathered women together to rage at people, and bouncers and all got regularly kicked out en masse. She got away with it all because she was my girlfriend, and I was one of the major and prolific organizers in NYC at that time – another timeless archetype that crops up throughout history and even today in the corporate world.
Her favorite book was The Right Use of Will, an impenetrable, obscure new age book full of astrology, reincarnation, and other, to my rational mind, superstitious rubbish. She began pushing the book on willing followers, and rumors of her recruiting sex slaves among some of the younger and gullible outer circle (including, alarmingly, one girl with HIV) began to circulate.
After a very hot fling on the way home from an outdoor party in the backseat of a car with a lithe young acrobatic Japanese girl that sat on my irrevocable rock hardness (with other unsuspecting people in the front!), I realized I may have to seek other avenues for sex, because Liza, though hot, was getting a little too hot to handle, and the tradeoffs began to become farther apart as she began to become a modern-day Kali.
Lisa wrote,
IS IT TRUE?
once more
the sun roaming on the carpenter’s backR
as he puts joist to the sill
and then occasionally he looks to the sky
as even the hen when it drinks
looks to heaven.
Once in Rome, I knelt in front of the Pope
as he waved from his high window.
It was because of pain in my bowels.
Occasionally the devil has crawled
in and out of me,
through my cigarettes I suppose,
my passionate habit
Now even the promised land of
Israel has a Hilton
and many tall buildings.
Perhaps it is true,
just as the sun passes over filth
and is not defiled.
For this reason, I can book a room in a Hilton
or its terrible playfellow The Holiday Inn
though I never know what city I’m in when I wake up.
I have lost my map
and Jesus has squeezed out of the Gideon,
down to the bar for pretzels and a beer.
Today the Supreme Court made abortion legal.
Bless them.
Bless all women
who want to remake their own likeness
but not every day.
Bless the woman who took the cop’s gun.
Bless also the woman who gave it back.
Bless woman for the apple she married.
Bless woman for her brain cells, little cell-computers.
Is it true?
Is it true?
Hare krishna, hare krishna,
krishna,krishna, hare h are
hare rama hare rama
rama rama hare,
they sing on the street s of Harvard Square,
tinkling their little thumb cymbals
and reed pipes, dancing their joy.
They know what they know.
When I tell the priest I am evil
he asks for a definition of the word.
Do you mean sin? he asks.
Sin, hell! I reply.
I’ve committed every one.
What I mean is evil,
( not meaning to be, you understand,
just something I ate).
Evil is maybe lying to God.
Or better, lying to love.
The priest shakes his head.
He doesn’t comprehend.
But the priest understands
when I tell him that I want to
pour gasoline over my evil body
and light it,
He says “That’s more like it!
That kind of evil!”
( Evil it seems comes in brands,
like soup or detergent)
Ms. Dog,
why is you evil?
It climbed into me.
It didn’t mean to.
Maybe my mother cut God out of me
when I was two in my playpen.
Is it too late, too late
to open the incision and plant Him there again?
All is wilderness.
All is hay that died from too much rain,
my stinky tears.
Whose God are you looking for? asked the priest.
I replied:
a starving man doesn’t ask what the meal is.
I would eat a tomato, or a firebird or music.
I would eat a moth soaked in vinegar.
But is there any food anywhere,
in the wind’s hat?
in the sea’s olive?
Is it true?
Is it true?
I wouldn’t mind if God were wooden,
I’d wear Him like a house,
praise His knot holes,
shine Him like a shoe.
I would not let Him burn.
I would not burn myself
for I would be wearing Him.
Oh wood, my father, my shelter,
bless you.
Bless all useful objects,
the spoons made of bone,
the mattress I cook my dreams upon,
the typewriter that is my church
with an altar of keys always waiting,
the ladders that let us climb,
both fireman and roofer.
Bless also the skillet,
black and oil-soaked, that fries eggs like the eyes of saints.
Bless the shoe for holding my foot
and letting me walk with the omnipotence
of a cat over glass or dog shit.
Bless the lights for going on
giving me eyes like two small cameras.
Is it true?
If all this can be
then why am I living in this country of black mud?
AND THE LAND SHALL BECOME BLAZING PITCH, WHICH NIGHT
AND DAY SHALL NEVER BE QUENCHED, AND ITS SMOKE SHALL
GO UP FOREVER. FROM GENERATION TO GENERATION IT SHALLLIE WASTE AND NO MAN SHALL PASS THROUGH IT EVER AGAIN.
Yet I pass through.
On the northern shore of Lake Galilee
Jesus and John preached to the local fishermen.
Yet I am not a fisherman.
I pass through.
The sun is black mud.
The moon becomes a blood ball.
If religion were a dream, someone said,
then it was still a dream worth dreaming.
True! True!
I whisper to my wood walls.
The state Capitol of Boston
has a gold dome.
During the War,
the one I grew up in,
they painted out the gold.
What did they think the Nazis
would do with it,
make it into teeth?
Peel it off and buy whores?
Wrap the Mayor up in it like a mummy
and put him on display in the Public Gardens?
In heaven,
there will be a secret door,
there will be flowers with eyes that wink,
there will be light flowing from a bronze be ll,
there will be as much love as there
are cunners off the coast of Maine,
there will be gold that no-one hides
from the Nazis,
there will be statues that the angel
inside of Michelangelo’s hand-fashioned.
I will lay open my soul
and hear an answer.
Hello. Hello. It will call back,
“Here’s a butter knife,” it will say.
“So scrape off your hunger and the mud.”
But is it true?
Is it true?
My tongue is a slit.
It cannot eat.
Even if I were a king, with a whole tongue,
I would be put to death with a shovel.
Tru e, I have friends,
a few,
each is a soul in two bodies.
Each on e is a man or a woman.
Let me now praise
the male of our species,
let me praise men,
and their eggs of courage,
their fine lives of the cock,
their awful lives in the office.
Let me praise men for eating the apple
and finding woman
like a big brain of coral.
Let me praise humans,
praise the men of God.
The men of God are God.
From the Tamil I read,
“The rock that resists the crowbar
gives way to the roots of the tender plant.”
I read this and go to sleep
and when I wake
Nixon will have declared the Vietnam war
is over. No more deaths, body by body.
( But this will be such old news
before you read my words.
Old and senile.)
Still I will hear this and will be happy,
happy kind of,
for I know there will be more wars
and more deaths
and then the headlines will be no more than a petal
upon a crater.
Deep earth,
redeem us from our redeemers.
Keep us God, far from our politicians
and keep us near to the grape that wakes us up.
Keep us near to the wolf of death .
Keep us near to the wife of the sun.
Is it true?
Is it true
Never mind.
I’ll do my own wash.
I have,
for some time,
called myself,
Ms. Dog.
Why?
Because I am almost animal
and yet the animal I lost most-
that animal is near to God,
but lost from Him.
Do you understand?
Can you read my hieroglyphics?
No language is perfect.
I only know English.
English is not perfect.
When I tell the priest I am full
of bowel movement, right into the fingers,
he shrugs. To him shit is good.
To me, to my mother, it was poison
and the poison was all of me
in the nose, in the ears, in the lungs.
That’s why language fails.
Because to one, shit is a feeder of plants,
to another the evil that permeates them
and although they try
day after of childhood,
they can’t push the poison out.
So much for language.
So much for psychology.
God lives in shit- I have been told.
I believe both.
Look,
It’s never fighting for fighting sake
or art for art sake
There is a battle going on
( or haven’t you heard)
( well it’s not a new one just the costumes
have changed)
The wolf always comes in sheep’s clothing
or haven’t you heard………..
Haven’t you heard
Haven’t you heard
That the truth shall set you free
Set you free
Don’t believe the hype.
Please please don’t believe the hype
It’s your choice
Are you gonna be a leader or a follower
A repressionist or an expressionist
A creator or absorbed borg style into someone else’s creativity
You have the power
Just someone somewhere told you that you didn’t…..
And you believed them.
There is no “scene” that will save you and transport you to the
nirvana that you are looking for, that we’re all looking for.
It has to be painstakingly created off of the bare bones of SELF.
I hear my detractors already echoing in the background
“Ego ego “
Not exactly.
Don’t let psychological generalizations fool you
The battle for radical self-expression………
Hey, nobody said it was going to be easy…….
* * *
In a patriarchal society many stories paint women into two corners. The doe-eyed naive beautiful princess, or the witch.
Wicked comes from wicca, which are holders of many of the forgotten sacred truths.
Oh then of course there’s the Older Wiser Fairy Godmother who’s some form of neuter.
Myths about true feminine power barely exist. Or they are scoffed at as being feminist, non-feminine, or are simply ignored.
In this culture, Women’s sexuality is rated strongly on how they appear in the eyes of men.
In “The Beauty Myth” by Naomi Wolf she mentions that women need only to remember that their sexuality did start or stop with the cultivation of that highly commercialized beauty mystique.
They need only to remember their early masturbatory experiences to recall that their sexuality exists outside the manufactured, yeah you heard me (fake) beauty categories passionately endorsed by a ravenous fashion and cosmetics industry.
It’s a big subject, obviously…………….
And anyway, what are you complaining about, us “wicked witches” gave you the best sex you ever had (your words).
What’s scary is also titillating ………………if you let it be
And if I’ve pulled out some hairs What do you a expect a Rainbow lioness to do.. ………………………………….
Merry Christmas Eve honey!…and to the rest of Jeff’s clan,….as we await the birth of OUR Lord Jesus Christ.
For the non-Christians, remember, there’s power in prayer. Doesn’t matter if its Buddha, Christ, Vishnu, or Krishna!
Humanity is presently destroying this beautiful planet, Gaia, if you will, animal and plant species are going extinct daily.
THERE IS POWER IN PRAYER, or call it meditation, or casting spells (if you’re Wiccan)
Humans must raise their consciousness to halt all these travesties.
RAINBOW WARRIORS MARCH ON. We consist of all races, creeds, classes, religions, …. …that is My Family…..
and you all are welcome to join.
Hosannah to the Highest. The gates to Zion will be opened. We can do it………..together.
Love, Liza
So one night at the Opium Den, I hooked up with some attractive young Columbian girl in the bathroom. People kept knocking on the bathroom door, and somehow the huge black British bouncer, a nation of Islam type, had a key, and opened the door, and we were caught naked, and Liza saw, and got so mad she started to tear the place up. Somehow in the melee, the bouncer got KO’d by one of Luis’s Brazillian marine tough guys. It ended with the owner, who drove up on his Harley, firing a gun in the air, ending the riot. Everyone scattered.
It’s funny how a couple can become so intertwined through habit that their relationship can survive such ordeals through the inertia for pure habits. But survive we did. The bar for normalcy kept struggling to keep pace with the increasingly deviant and bizarre behavior.
Somehow after of all this mayhem, we had a very spiritual weekend taking mushrooms out in the Pine Barrens. I had never seen her look so good, so healthy and whole, so happy. This observation was made between me thinking the trees were trying to reclaim my body, and I was surrounded by hyperdimensional guys in lazy boys, each extending a hand to shake. Shake it, and die, I thought to myself. On another trip, I showed her a huge vial of ketamine with a tiny skull statue in resting in the powder. She freaked out and tossed it over her shoulder, and I looked for it for hours, never finding it.
These weekends out in the woods inspired me to find a novel solution. Feeling a need to give her a creative outlet, I formed a group with her and Luis from Brazil to throw a monthly party called Goa Trash in SoHo.
This seemed to work at first, but one night I brought an acquaintance from my email list, “Trixie,” a much-older lady idealistic scientist friend who worked at the federal top secret research facility on Long Island, D.A.R.P.A. on mushroom and MDMA research (for treating the terminally ill and PTSD, respectively) and Liza got strangely jealous, and came up to us on the SoHo cobblestone street, pulled my steel drum off my shoulder, and proceeded to bang it over Trixie’s bloodied head.
The cops were called, and I told them everything I knew. Liza and one of her minions went to jail. This was the last straw for me. After all the black paint, the riots, the sex slave cult, assaulting a D.A.R.P.A. psychedelic scientist was just too much for me. I was beginning to think maybe Liza was veering over the neurosis line into full-blown mentally ill. I also wondered how much I had to do with her mental state, remembering Opium Den. It is my fault, I told myself. The moment the waters in a relationship start to churn, rather than directly address the problem (alcohol!) I go have sex with someone.
The aftermath was anticlimactic. She began having unprotected sex with random men in bathrooms. I was disgusted, but she clung on to me. She started hanging with Yacc. Apparently not for sex, but to have a follower. He of course was more than happy to be along for the ride, and maybe getting some in the process.
Yacc was a disreputable Quasimodo-wth-an-evil-streak fresh off of beating his girlfriend. I warned her to stay away from him. She ignored my admonitions. Then her truck didn’t start, Yacc started acting skitzy, and somehow in the chaos (according to her) her father died of a heart attack.
Her father’s death changed her. After that I never heard from her again. I reached out, showed up at her door with blue flowers, and her little dog Julik (Russian for ‘thief’) remembered me! But she awkwardly shut the door and later a mutual friend said she associated blue with evil. NEVER MIND that her goddamn precious Right Use of Will had a blue cover. I couldn’t win.
So that was that. In with a string of coincidental meetings, and out with Blue Flowers Are Evil. I’ll always lover her, but her violence outbreaks made me realize, NO.
And I don’t even have any of her artwork to show here. That little detail speaks volumes. I should have cared more about what she considered important.
Woulda coulda shoulda – IF I had just… banned her from alcohol, stayed with shrooms and weed and the occasional ayahuasca – things might have been OK. Now that I’m sober, this is even more clear. Alcohol abuse destroys lives.
But that’s just the words I tell myself though for closure. I simply wasn’t man enough to contain her female fury. I shoulda stuck a saddle on that mare and broke its rebellious spirit, or at least prevented it from starting riots.
Deep down, I’d still hook up with her in a heartbeat. I don’t mean to sound flippant or disrespectful, and I probably should end this tale with some feelgood New Age bromide, but that would be disingenuous:
It’s part of men’s ancestral wisdom that Crazy Women are Great in the Sack.
I will probably get a bloody nose for writing this, if I am lucky.
Vive la machine.
Prequel: I Was the One Who Knocked
