The Extra "E"

The New Age dawns for me in California. I embrace it for all it's worth and celebrate by killing my inner child. Really.

My grandmother, Beelzebubbe, used to clean out the refrigerator of any house she entered. Family, friends; even if she was just a dinner guest you could often find her in the kitchen emptying out the fridge, sometimes before anyone was in there doing the dishes. She would be there everything that that wasn’t unopened and vacuum-sealed from the store. Sometimes she’d throw that stuff away too, talking to no one in particular while she went along, grunting, rasping, saying "Good! Get rid of it! Good!"

She was always proud of leaving her hosts with almost no food, her work there done. That is probably how I am most like her. I have an impatience with any kind of mess and want things to be clean and orderly, gotten rid of at all costs. If a scab needs to be pulled do it now. Whatever the cost.

There is a curious, unintended upside. As controlling my physical environment grows more and more vital to my sense of well-being, imposing absolute order on my physical surroundings gives my mind the freedom to wander about recklessly. As the early '90s dawn, I come to neither expect nor want explanations for the mysteries of creativity, of the metaphysical world, or the human spirit. Who knew? I begin to explore lots of weird, supernatural, New Age, pop-psychology ideas, reveling in their messiness. Maybe I just like being contrary. People who know me expect rigidity. Perversely, I like surprising them with my California-appropriate spiritual openness. I even go to an energy movement specialist who hypnotizes me, drains the darkness from my chest, and helps me kill my inner child.

That death gives birth to the title of this opus.

It is a mercy killing. The psycho/meta energy movement man regresses me down to seeing this pathetic little boy (ostensibly me) and asks me what the boy wants. I say, "To die." I don't know where it comes from, but I know in an instant that it is quite true. His lonely suffering has been so acute, so damaging, that the only real answer is euthanasia. He dies happily.

I then can't resist running around and telling everyone I know, and many people I have only just met, that I have, indeed, just killed my inner child.

As I do with most things, I make light of it, enjoying the strange, counterintuitive triumph of doing something that feels revolutionary. And surprisingly, it does feel rather light and buoyant. Perhaps letting my inner child die is giving me an honest to God breakthrough. Or maybe it's the Herbal Life I'm taking. Or the wheatgrass juice. Or my new friend, the psychic dog sitter.

I don't know if it has anything to do with the killing of my inner self, but gradually I stop paying people for massages with happy endings. I'm not ready for real love, but I want to be. I vow to at least try to meet someone, and drop the pleasure for-hire since I intuit that I am unlikely to acquire a real boyfriend by buying one.

My skills at courtship are still rudimentary though. All I know how to do is pick up people in bars and clubs. The last time I did that, back in New York, it was a hunky bartender who rather inadvertently (I think) peed in my bed. We were both very drunk and he fell asleep as soon as he climbed into my bed, leaving me horny and pissed off. When I awoke his mouth was below my waist and he was holding me rigidly in place on my side of the bed, not letting me spread out over to the side where he had slept. When he was gone I figured out why. There was a huge puddle of pee on his side. Massage therapists and hookers don't wet the bed. Not unless you pay them to.

There was this sex channel for a long time in New York on free cable, where Robin Byrd had a talk show that opened with the song, "Baby Bang My Box," and where Al Goldstein of Screw Magazine would interview guests as he sat naked, his flaccid penis hidden by bulges of fat (a life changing, Medusa-like sight, that could replace capital punishment if it weren't so cruel and unusual). This station also offered commercials for prostitutes and phone sex. "We have warm, Oriental girls waiting to serve you." Like that. One particular phone sex commercial has stayed with me all these years. It was for 976-PEEE. A woman peed on a cop while saying, "The extra 'E' is for extra pee." Comments? Questions? Email me.