3

The smell of burning sage choked me as I walked through the front door. It was 85 the house, a touch warmer than outside. Sweat formed almost the moment I passed through the cool of the garage stairway into the foyer – its walls glistening with beads of dampness. The entryway was filled with the sulfurous odor of the homemade herbal tea Allison brewed constantly in a small, oddly shaped, small, earth toned ceramic cauldron designed, she claimed, for such utility.

The heavy scent of lavender joined the party as I walked up the carpeted stairs to my bedroom. My lungs, now thick with humidity and scent craved the clean, albeit hot air of the Santa Monica Mountains outside. I slid the wide French doors open in the bedroom. My throat was closing as I flopped down on the king size platform bed and gazed out at the mountains through eyes that were tearing from the heat permeated with the rude conglomeration of new age scents. Pressing two fingers of each hand against my eyes to rub away the rawness, I drew myself up and changed into a pair of jeans and T shirt. I filled the sink with cold water and bent into, blowing bubbles for nearly a minute. My eyes were filled with water, my nose touching the porcelain. Staying here, under water, head floating forever. A good thing I thought for a moment before I ran out of air, withdrew my head and shook it quickly, spraying water across the mirror. I dried off and walked down the hallway, feeling my T shirt dampening in the few short moments it took me to reach Allison’s room.

“What the fuck is going on?” I shouted through a combination of now raw coughs and harsh sneezes.

No answer.

“Allison, what the hell are you doing?”

Nothing.

She was lying on a futon, down quilt over her slender body, she know believed to be “frail” because of her various healers’ conjectures that her immune system was weak and her adrenals weaker. She seemed to know what that meant. I supposed she simply had an allergy and no heart for life. On the other hand, she hadn’t worked for years and I’d seen some otherwise intelligent women reach that point of inertia where the job market doesn’t want them and the simply turn stupid. Allison, at once bright, had now made that turn. Yeah.

Cloaked in sweats, as usual, over the flannel nightgown she rarely removed until noon. The ubiquitous Walkman headphones was plugged into her ears, now a part of her anatomy. The room was dark, shades over the windows drawn closed. The futon rested but a few inches from the floor. Her eyes were closed and her lips were barely moving; the sounds emanating were unintelligible. She was speaking in “tongues,” again. Probably her first language now.

Smoke from the smoldering, dried sage bouquets placed about the bed gave the room a Los Angeles midsummer’s day haze. Allison smelled as if she’d bathed in lavender, drank it, then used it as a cologne. Scattered on the bed about her were scraps of paper covered with geometric patterns, each with a smaller piece in the center, carefully folded four times. There was writing on the them. Symbols. Couldn’t be Aramaic, she hadn’t a clue as to what that was. Pig Latin…or Esperanto. Tiny prayer sheets, filled with affirmations of the “new age,” mostly asking for peace, and wealth, material wealth. Grand amounts of money, jewels and journeys.. Weird. Different. Way too different, even for me. Pathological. Yeah. Cassette tapes imprinted with the lost voices of her channels were strewn around the bed on the floor. Several vials of brackish looking liquid herbs dotted the nightstand, surrounding one of the urns of burning sage. Two more urns were on the floor at the foot of the bed.

“Allison, what the hell is going on?”

“Isis told me that these are healing things and…”

A fruitcake. Perfect. If my house could be bottled, I could sell it as am emetic and recoup some of that hundred and a half she just spent on Isis, her new channel, over the phone no less, to guide her to greater spirituality and me into insanity, if not poverty, a condition that, because of my Samuel Johnson-like demeanor, “’tis better to live rich than to die rich,” is fairly easy to achieve.

Still gasping, sweaty and now quite aromatic I walked out of her room, rolling my eyes and shaking my head, gestures now so natural around her friends wondered if was inflicted with Parkinson’s. Downstairs, then, through the haze, past the tiny alters on the window sills filled with totems and notes to Allison’s “higher self,” crystals adorning the bookshelves along with “wish boards” cluttered with cutouts from magazines of things she wanted and scores of meditation tapes. An olefacts new age paradise. Better back in graduate school with cinder block bookshelves, mattress on the floor and an old Voice of Music stereo. Hell, Book and Candle. My own special hell.

I ramped the air conditioning down to 60, glanced around the cedar living room that rose nearly two stories. Oh God, those damned art deco leopard skin couches. A whore house hell. The Eberle sisters. Chicago in the 30s, my favorite period an eyesore. In smoky haze I caught my shin for the thousandth time on the heavy glass coffee table that separated the couches. It rested on three large gold ceramic balls. Brass balls. Neat to see them rolling down the driveway out into the canyon….bowling for cars and coyotes. Allison’s follies. I poured myself a glass of wine, grabbed the laptop computer and walked out on to the deck in the early California evening air.

My litany. My life now to write for a couple of hours in the evening. Long letters Maggie. Work on the novel. Getaway money, Pop used to call it. Nowadays its “fuck you” money. The world has become such a harsh and hard place. No one says please or thank you. Keep Maggie close. Carry on writer…doctor…nurse. Where are those great Brit comedies these days? Where are those days?