Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls

BANDLEADER’S GIRLFRIEND

“You are embarrassing yourself on a national level,” Sister yells into the phone. “What about Dead Mom?”

“Dead Mom is not a mellow subject, Sis.” I look over at my dearest lover CT, who is lying on the couch rubbing slices of ripe grapefruit across his chest. He’s watching a television program about sexual behavior in dolphins.

“Such liquid-rubber bodies,” he whispers. CT is the lead singer for Wolf Rainbow. They are a total hit but CT doesn’t measure success in terms of money; true success lies in Worm Vibrations, or wormbrations.

CT stands for Copper Tone. He is into the rays of the sun.

Sister clears her throat. Talking with her makes me feel a little cosmically disturbed. I try to remind myself that she has invested a lot of time in me, that it became quite a habit for her, a passion even, and I think it is important for people to follow their passions. Unless, like Sister’s, they will hinder someone’s enlightenment. Namely mine.

My enlightenment is sparkling pink water and Sister is a levee, but CT allows me to rise up and overwhelm her walls. Sister has never before experienced the unrestricted passion of one as enlightened to the Worm as CT is. She has no idea what to do with such love; it’s like giving a can of food to forest-people who can’t understand its monetary value, or the delicious pleasure that awaits them inside.

A good example of this occurred when I took CT home for Thanksgiving and Sis extended her hand to him.

“Mother of my love-cub, I greet you,” he said, and softly licked her face. After this display of vulnerability Sis’s vibes were very tight and secluded. The corners of her mouth tucked themselves firmly in like hotel bed sheets.

CT and I prefer to sleep outdoors but sometimes we’re forced to stay in really nice hotels. It’s all Management. If it were up to CT we’d just find a field close to our next venue and sleep there, but Management makes some good points: privacy, etc. CT’s nightly rituals, which are not exclusionary of nudity and spiritual vision accelerators for communication with the Worm Eternal, can be wrongly interpreted by people like the authorities.

Grog, the bassist, uses humor to mask his negative thinking when he agrees with the Management about hotels. He says things like “How can I round up babes for bonefests and take them to the middle of a corn field? The hottest babes with the biggest milkbags will not go for this. They want open bars and heart-shaped beds. Such are the desires of those with giant milkbags.” Then he’ll pause, adding, “I can’t believe you sleep in the buff where it is all wild and shit. What if a snake bit your johnson?”

Now Sister gives a loud gasp. She always talks so quickly that what she says seems urgent and true. It is some kind of trick. “You’re on nearly every television station right now! I called you because I need to talk to you about something serious, and now there’s this drama. Do you ever stop to think about how your actions affect others? I mean what if angels get one day to peek down to earth from Heaven and Tuesday was the one day Mom had for all eternity to check up on us and our lives? When she opened the clouds she would’ve been greeted with your… your spectacle.” Sister begins crying.

I know from experience that her tears aren’t clear; they’re a strange gray color like weird steam. I always figured they were mixing with her makeup until I realized she didn’t wear any (not to be commercialized but she could use it. Pastel, bare minerals). Her face is kind of gray too because she never goes outside; she fears nature like it’s a rapist or murderer, even though it’s so the opposite—nature is what’s getting raped and murdered! But despite not having sun damage she got wrinkles before her time from watching constant news television and subconsciously reproducing Dan Rather’s facial expressions.

Sister likes to pull back the curtains of her windows then stare out of them and look up at the sky suspiciously.

“What did you want to talk about? Do you need some money?” Of late, Sister has been plagued with a variety of fiscal obligations, something about back taxes. “Listen, Sis, I do understand what you’re saying.” I peek behind my shoulder and watch CT—naked, gentle CT, pink grapefruit juices dripping down his body like cartoon sweat—pretend to plug the blowhole of the dolphin on television with a slice of his grapefruit. His giggles are like heartbeats: steady and seconds apart. “But you just have to realize that we’re on different planes of existence. I’m not saying I’m better than you, just that my path is way more open with lots of colors.”

Sister’s weeping intensifies. “What the hell are you talking about?” she asks. “You’re speaking the drug-talk. I want Claudia back and I want her in English.”

If the spasm that afflicts my back and spine at the mention of my old name “Claudia” could make a sound, a single note, it would be unharmonious beyond this dimension. No one would even be able to hear what a wonky note it would be, because the human ear is not advanced enough. It’s one of those things; the sound is made but does anyone hear it? Was it made? I speak but Sister does not hear me. Do I speak?

“Uuuuuuuhhhhhhhhmmnnnngg.” CT lets out a guttural moan to begin his a.m. bowel gyrations. His torso bounces up and down while his hips move like he’s using an invisible hula-hoop.

His is a hula-hoop made of enchantment. It’s built of understanding, spiritual experience, and opium ether, paired with a variety of other things the human eye cannot see and the human ear cannot hear. Most of our senses are completely inadequate and not to be trusted; our true feelings come from our wormholes, often described as “the heart in our stomach between our legs.”

“Think about it,” CT likes to say, “The organ that the wormless refer to as ‘heart’ is like, entirely muscle. Like a body-builder or a worker bee. If bees have muscles.”

Sister does not affect my wormhole, but her disapproval makes my pulse quite irregular.

“Sister,” I say firmly, “Claudia is dead.”

Sis wails. I feel like I am some sort of hostage negotiator, except Sister is both the hostage and the captor. “We’ve been over this. My name is now Sorcerella Van Crystal. It’s official; I have stationary. Our bathrooms are filled with SVC embroidered towels. You used them to wipe the perspiration from your forehead the last and only time you visited our tree house. Please don’t backpedal. You’ve chosen to remain in my journey, thus my life.”

When Sister is really upset she begins to salivate. Her harsh words shoot out at me through the phone: sleds of anger luging down a hateful mountain. And the thing with mountains is, the higher their altitude, the lower their boiling point.

“Don’t give me this Sorcerella crap, Claudia. Jesus. The court fines I paid when you lived with me during high school. That guy who set your car on fire in our driveway. After everything we’ve been through, some ooga-booga rock weirdo can come along and brainwash you just like that?”

Sister is not receptive to meditative breathing exercises so I decide to suggest something a little more hands-on for her anxiety. “Sister, if I send you some special brownies, will you eat them?”

CT passes by with the walking stick and gives me the thumbs-up, meaning he’s embarking on a defecation-stroll. I wave goodbye. Perhaps sensing my tension, he jiggles his dingy slightly.

“Sweet earth for my loveworm,” he shouts, “I shall return.” Several flies are enjoying the streaks of grapefruit juice that ran down his chest and pooled in his groin and thighs. As he walks past me there is a loud unified buzzing; it is so cosmic, all those individual flies but just one buzz. It strikes me that it’s like my feelings for Sister—all the different harsh emotions could come out in one unified primal scream. I emit this into the receiver once I feel CT has ventured far enough on his defecation stroll that he will not hear me and fear danger has struck my physical person. CT and I do not like to use toilets-we only do this when we have to, like in super-posh hotels and backstage on television programs and concert tours. Sometimes the super posh hotels have double toilets and then he and I sit on them together, stare at each other, and try to predetermine when the other will flush, thereby flushing at the same time without ever looking away from one another’s eyes or communicating a will to do so. We have gotten very, drastically close to simultaneously flushing on more than one occasion. I’m pretty sure complete synchronicity is nigh the next time we are at the Plaza.

“You blew my ear out. I’m hanging up.”

Sister does not understand that her ears are already worthless. Their multiple defects predated my scream by decades.

“Sis, if I want to ingest the most powerful hallucinogen the Worm Eternal has provided to earthlings and copulate with my soul mate beneath the desert stars, that is my business and my right.”

“The balcony of your Vegas hotel suite is not the desert! Do you know how many photos there are of you plastered everywhere, how many videos? How is continuous sex for that long even possible? Did police really have to break into your room?”

The vital fluid allows for radical love-energy. Management was charged for the cost of the door. “Sister, no harm, no foul.”

“No HARM? You look like sex freaks to the entire world! You should see the faces you’re making! They’re not even attractive. I’m saying this objectively. You look carsick and blinded by headlights.”

“It’s not about how we look to other humans, Sis. Third eye. There’s more to see than you think.”

“Ugh, it’s on the TV right now.” There’s a long silence; I can almost hear her eyes squinting. “What the hell is that, a tattoo?”

I decline to answer, as Sister wouldn’t understand. I recently had a bottle of wine tattooed on my mons.

“CT and I got married,” I offer.

Sister hangs up then calls back and hangs up again, then finally calls back and is sort of able to speak through the wheezing. I stare at the healing crystals I glue-gunned to my phone in the mirror, a sort of second-line of defense against Sister’s negative energies. Work, I beg them. Glow.

“To that creep,” she sputters, “to that pervert hustler? Did you know he hit on me at Thanksgiving? I was putting the cranberry sauce into Tupperware when I felt a stiffness on my leg and turned around. He was down on the floor like a crab rubbing his…his…extension near my ankles. His pants were that new kind of denim, the stretchy stuff. I could feel everything.”

“He is a wonderful lover, Sis.”

“I can’t do this right now,” she says, and then hangs up.

I stay on the phone and let the open dial tone be a sort of beacon-call, a homing signal for CT to return, bowels empty, groin hungry.

I should mention that Sister is also my mother, somewhat. When Mother died, Sister was nineteen and I was four. As a teenager I used to love calling Sister “Smother” whenever she was overbearing—a perfect combination of sister and mother.

“Sustainable,” replies CT, “so bitching.” We’re at the home of a fashion designer whose mansion is built into the side of a cave. One room of his house is actually filled with bats; when I grabbed a flashlight sitting by the door and shined it up to the ceiling, there were tons of bats instead of popcorn paint. The room has no furniture due to “Ze guano, yeesh, ze guano,” but there is a mounted television on the wall that plays looped footage of a young girl feeding a loaf of French bread to a Dalmatian dog over and over again.

We came to the designer in order to get fitted full-body leather suits. “Ju can wear zees forever,” he said, “Drink en zem, sex en zem, die en zem.” They have zippers and ties all over the place so they can stay on during a variety of activities, like going to the bathroom or getting an immunization shot in the upper arm.

CT raises his glass of wine up to the ceiling, a kind salute. The wine is red and has 10-15 drops of bat blood in each bottle; it’s from the designer’s own vineyard with blood from his own bats.

CT, who is very pale and pretty always, lifts the glass to his mouth and sucks it in with his cheeks so the wine glass stays magically attached to his face as a sort of bulb-nose. He looks at the ground and puts his arms out in a crucifixion pose, then begins moving his arms. He looks like a hummingbird that has been transported to a different planet, one where the environment is harsh and there are no flowers so it has to fly around all the time with its own personal glass vase of nectar attached to its face.

It strikes me that the cave home we are in is one such environment; a hummingbird could not live here without a nectar appendage-bottle.

The designer disappears for a minute and comes back holding three pairs of night vision goggles. “Let us go back inside ze bat cave,” he suggests. He is no longer wearing a shirt.

The goggles make everything green and give us all emerald eyes, the bats and CT and the designer. Several battery-operated floor cleaners roam around the cave’s paved cement and eat the guano. They remind me of sting rays or giant moving sand dollars, very flat and white.

“It’s like we’re underwater,” I say, “an underwater cave.” But in the cave, as in water, my voice does not seem able to travel.

The designer kneels down onto the floor and begins untying CT’s new leather suit-fly. For a moment there is a sting of panic in my stomach; my mellowness is suddenly a balloon full of water being poked with a stick. I’m not sure if it’s going to burst open or maybe just spring a tiny leak or perhaps not puncture at all. The free love of the Worm Eternal instructs us to see one another as fellow worms, genderless, openings identical and indistinguishable.

But sometimes I fail the Worm and grow jealous.

CT hands me a bottle of bat blood wine. “My cherished one, please pour this on top of Gustav and me, pour it slowly so that he and I shall be like a primordial fountain flooded with the blood of cursed statues, unholy stones.”

And then the stick poking my balloon turns into a feather, and I am tickled. I feel my Inner Worm remind me that the Intensity comes when I forget that life is art, and Intensity is what clogs the path to enlightenment. As CT likes to say, “The boy at the top of the mountain of knowledge, the one standing like a flamingo with one leg straight and one leg bent. He is a mild child.”

As I ready the bottle at the top of CT’s golden locks, dead center in the middle of his part, Gustav’s head lifts up and he gives a half-hearted protest, “Don’t spill, ze suit, ze suit,” but CT gently moves Gustav’s head back downward, the way a parent might guide the cheek of a child who has just had a nightmare back down to the pillow.

“How can I wear a leather suit that does not carry the stains of wine and blood?” asks CT, and Gustav does not answer; of course it was rhetorical, and the bloody wine pouring over their green night-vision bodies looks completely black. I feel more powerful than ever, like a superhero who has shadow-juice as one of her many weapons. I streak their bodies with the unseen.

When my phone rings there’s about a fourth of the bottle left. I tap the opening at CT’s mouth and drizzle the rest of it inside until he makes a happy noise.

My phone’s screen is so green that beneath the goggles it seems interactive. I speak to it for some time before realizing that I need to open the phone in order to answer the call. Luckily it’s just Sister, who calls again and again and again until I answer. Once, when I had a few squares of acid beneath my eyelids, I finally distinguished the source of the music but then mistook the phone for a fetal orb—not an orb from the beginning of time but a baby orb, one that has only been alive for a few million years—so I sang children’s songs to it and told it bedtime stories hoping that its musical electronic crying would please, please stop. I later got distracted by CT leading me to a hammock that had been stretched over top a hot tub at his request by the really expensive hotel’s staff, but the next morning I saw that I had eighty-seven missed calls, all from Sister.

“Hello,” I say. I am unsure of the duration of time it takes me to complete the word. The bat blood wine—at least our particular serving, I am beginning to realize—has another complication to its chemical makeup besides alcohol and blood.

“Oh Lord. Are you on drugs right now? I can call you back later, when it wears off. This is important.” I can hear sliding window blinds in the background and I know that she is staring out at the sky with a deep frown on her face. Even though the sound is distorted (it sounds like the opening of the world’s largest tin can) another part of my brain knows those blinds well enough to recognize the sound they make even when it’s camouflaged by drugs.

“I’m fine,” I say. “Just sleepy. Just terribly awake.” I hear Sister’s nervous fingers tapping on the glass of the windowpane, or maybe someone knocking on a really thick foam door. “Sister?” I ask, because it is so quiet except for the rustling of the bats and the gentle sounds of Gustav’s mouth that I can’t remember whether the conversation has ended and she has already hung up or not.

“Listen,” she says. “I want the rest of your share of Mother’s estate money. All of the little that’s left. I want you to sign your half over to me. CT is rich and you don’t need it. The real reason I call you all the time and ask for money is because I’m not in good health and you’ve been paying my doctor’s bills. Sometimes I need medications badly and quickly but I feel like I have to ask you every damn time I use some of your money from the trust, and you’re usually impossible to get a hold of. How can I put this delicately? I want you to give me the money so I don’t have to talk to you ever again.”

The electronic vacuum cleaners, perhaps detecting CT’s new emission on the floor, all rush over to CT and Gustav, encircling them. It’s very cute, like the two of them are surrounded by a hungry brood of flat Maltese puppies. “Mine sweet bitter fruit,” Gustav is saying to CT, licking the stains of wine on CT’s suit of leather.

“Sister,” I say worriedly, “you are hurt? Your health is failing? We shall heal you together! We shall sail through the air like spores from a fern of renewal, a pollen containing life and promise, a seedling that blossoms into substance where before there was void!”

Sister’s words take on a strained, metal colander tone; her voice is so tight that it will hardly even strum. “You don’t know anything about life or trying to live,” she says. “Would you like to call my insurance company and ask if they accept ferns of renewal or…wait, why am I still participating in this conversation? Tell me where you are right now and I’ll bring the paperwork and a few things of Mother’s for you to have, and that will be it for us, OK? You have no idea how long I have wished for this peace. To be able to turn on the TV and see you walking down Rodeo drive leading a goat that you painted to look like a giraffe and hear the gossip police screech about what a lunatic you are, and simply agree and change the channel. I can’t do that now. I can’t do that with you in my life; instead I have to call and try and tell you to hurry up and get the damn goat into a van or a limo or what-the-hell-ever and move away from the cameras.”

“It was actually CT who painted the goat—”

“I DON’T CARE,” she yells. “WHERE ARE YOU? THAT IS ALL I NEED TO KNOW.”

I pause. I’m fearful that Sister will not be satisfied with my location.

“We are in a bat cave inside of a cave-mansion somewhere in Nevada,” I say. Gustav looks up at me and waves a chiding finger. “No partiez, sweezheart. I have to be up early tomorrow. My friend in Milan is getting circumcised for his fortieth birthday and he commissioned ze codpiece you saw in my studio. Zat sort of ting, you deliver zat sort of ting in person.”

I am impressed; I had no idea it was a codpiece. “It’s so beautiful, Gustav. I thought it was perhaps a jeweled urn for the ashes of someone really special, like your father maybe.”

“WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT,” cries Sis, and then she hangs up.

“Ze ashes of mine father, zat is a sad story.” Gustav points to the electric vacuums. “Zees hungry suckers, I love zhem, I have zem swarming in every room. But when my friend knocked over zee father, zey ate him before I could find zee remote to make zem stop.”

The next morning, Sister calls back. “Let’s try this again,” she says. “Where are you?”

“We’re on the bus,” I tell her. I don’t remember how or why, but I know that we are. The bus-bed CT and I have is so exceptional; it looks like a large clamshell and can even shut. It’s not good to shut it for the entire night, though, because then the oxygen we breathe starts to get a little recycled and we wake up with bad headaches.

“Okay,” she says. Her tone implies that I am completely useless. This makes me sad, so I stare into the pearly whiteness of CT’s teeth. He consciously sleeps with his mouth very open. There is a complicated reason why he does this but we’ve both forgotten what it is. “Where is the bus headed to?”

“I will have to let you speak to the driver, Sister.” She makes a ‘tsk’ing sound. “Thank God,” she says.

“Sister,” I beg her, “please listen. Tell me what has stricken your body. There are so many things we can do to detoxify you.”

“No,” she snaps. “You are a spoiled brat with no grip on reality. We don’t all have rich rock-star boyfriends. The hardest part of your day is figuring out what substance you’re on and deciding what is real and what is imaginary.” She sighs, and it is a loaded sigh; I hear leaves stirring inside of it, very dead, very dried leaves. They scare me, these leaves inside my sister’s voice.

“Let me get you the driver,” I whisper.

Usually Sister’s words do not trouble my eternal waters, but this news about her health has weakened my immunity. I make a mental note that later on, I should put on the crystal helmet and get inside of the sensory depravation unit. Once Wolf Rainbow got sued because a fan in Idaho climbed aboard the bus without our knowledge, got inside of the sensory depravation unit, and was not discovered until we were in Atlanta one week later. It took him a few months to speak but when he did all he could talk about was how totally grateful he was, so his family finally dropped the suit.

“Here,” I tell her, “here you go.”

“Finally,” she exclaims, “someone sane.”

“Here, his name is Fractyl Clymber, Clymber with a y.” I tap him on the shoulder and he gives a jump and spills a large thermos of purple tea. Because he is somewhat small, his arms have to stretch wide to hold onto the bus’s large steering wheel. This combined with the fact that his eyes aren’t very open makes him look like a sleepy bird.

“Sorry,” he stutters, “I thought you were something else.”

“This is my sister,” I say, pointing to my phone.

“My brother,” he nods, pointing to his phone on the dashboard. He lets out a short giggle, then looks rather distraught.

“No I mean my sister’s on the phone.”

“Cool,” he nods.

“She wants to talk to you.”

The phone is down at my side, but I can hear a sound coming from it, a scream-noise.

“If it’s about that,” he emphasizes, “I don’t know anything about that. Whoever did that, I’m sure…like I’m sure that was a total accident.”

“No, she wants to know where we’re going.”

“Oh.” He searches the many dials of the bus’s control panel for a moment. “A sign should be coming up soon or something. These roads are totally filled with signs.”

I feel Perry, CT’s Press Agent, put his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll talk to her,” he says. I nod and hand him the phone.

It’s daytime but the bus has heavy black curtains and tinted windows, so it always seems like the sun hasn’t come up yet. I trod back to our bedroom. The bus’s thick, shaggy carpeting is soothing on my bare feet. At almost every stop we get the carpet shampooed because none of us wear shoes when we walk around inside. It feels amazing.

I crack the clamshell open a little wider to get in then lower its lid back down to where there’s still a safe amount of sliver. When I nuzzle up to CT, his leather wine suit smells like bread. In his sleep his fingers find my hair and kind of party a little.

Moments later, there’s a light knock on the clamshell. Perry slides my phone through its crack. “We’re meeting her in Dallas,” he tells me. I whisper thanks.

“Listen,” he says.

The cracked-open clamshell bed has a crescendo effect on sound, it’s even shaped like a crescendo, so when I’m inside I barely hear the first few words in someone’s sentence but then the last few words are quite loud. “If you want me to deal with her for you, thAT’S FINE, SHE SEEMS REALLY ANGRY AND MAYBE…”

“No,” I whisper. “The Worm Eternal values fortitude. I must pursue a final attempt to bring Sister enlightenment and prove my spiritual strength to the Worm Eternal.” Perry pats the top of the clam.

“OK, kiddo.”

Our conversation rousts CT. He turns and puts his lips on my neck. His lips are soft as olive oil; he decorates them like attractive women do. “I was having this dream that you were a starfish and I was feeding you tempeh bacon,” he says, and I shut the clam bed and we love each other; I let the whole thing with Sister be like grains of sand that just polish the softness of CT’s lips even softer.

There was a slight delay in meeting the sister.

After eating some pumpkin flax brittle, CT’s stomach was getting a little torn up and he requested Fractyl Clymber stop the bus for a defecation walk.

“Not here man,” said Fractyl, “right here is too close to that,” but after about twenty minutes Fractyl did pull over.

We all got out and practiced yoga behind the bus while CT walked ahead. Shortly after he squatted, a sports car screeched up and a man inside the car jumped out pointing a gun.

On CT’s defecation walks, he wanders until the universe gives him a sign that he is in the right place to go. Unfortunately, this time the universe had directed CT to relieve himself in the same place where the man from the car’s mother and sister had been hit and killed by a drunk driver. The man kept pointing the gun at two white crosses with “MOTHER” and “SISTER” written on them, and a large plastic floral bouquet with pictures and ribbons.

CT was trying to explain himself. “Like, I detected that this was a sacred place, man. That’s why I stopped here; it was like, the earth was saying Here, Worship Here, I mean this is like a shrine.”

“You were shitting on it!” the man with the gun screamed.

“Do you hierarchize organic matter?” asked CT. “Because I don’t think that’s the right way to go about things.”

Just then a policeman pulled up, and several minutes later a lot of photographers showed up too. Perry walked over to me while CT was educating the cop regarding the back-and-forth of earth and man.

“You should probably call your sister,” Perry said. “I don’t even know if we’re going to make it to Dallas on time for the show.”

I decided to go ahead and dial her number then figure out exactly what to say while the phone was ringing, but Sister picked up on the first ring.

“Sister,” I began, “there has been an unfortunate detour. You’ll have to meet us at the arena. Tell them “HASHISH420” when you go to the backstage area. That’s our code phrase. They’ll totally let you in.”

“I’m not going to your boyfriend’s concert and I’m not saying that phrase. What do you mean, detour?”

When the police showed up, everyone except Perry and CT, who were already talking to the man with the gun, had been forced to run back inside the bus and ingest any and all products that might complicate an already precarious situation. We divided them equally according to body mass, meaning Fractyl Clymber and I took the least, but it was still a pretty heavy load. Grog was already freaking out and had locked himself in the bus’s closet to masturbate.

The words coming out of my mouth were like a canoe at the tip of a waterfall. I saw what was ahead but was unable to stop it. I am always for truth but with Sister sometimes the truth has to be dressed up a little bit, not hidden but wrapped up in a way that makes it better, like a Christmas present. I was feeling very chatty though, and the sweat on my tongue didn’t help. Everything just poured out.

“CT accidentally relieved himself on this grave, and now a lot of people are taking my picture.” The flashes from the paparazzi’s light bulbs were bright and painful but I couldn’t stop staring at them. I moved closer to the flash. “I’m like a moth or something right now,” I told her. She started crying and then Perry grabbed the phone and told me to get a full-body cape for CT from the bus closet. CT was so into sharing the truth of the Worm Eternal that he had not yet proceeded to tie up the bottom and fly of his leather suit.

“Grog’s in the closet masturbating,” I told Perry. “He’s really freaked.”

Perry sighed and nodded. “You stay put. I’ll get it.”

When we finally arrive at the arena, the noise of the crowd doing the Howl of the Wolf is deafening. Their pack call drowns out the opening band, an experimental metal group utilizing electric bongos.

The arena’s head of security approaches us. He’s shivering with fear. “You’ve got to get out there,” he pleads to CT, his voice trembling, “I’ve never seen a crowd get this crazy, and I’ve worked this arena for almost thirty years.”

CT throws off his cape and uses his arm to make a sweeping motion, like he’s violently clearing a table. “No problemo,” he says, “this is my gig, man. Don’t even worry about it.” The fly of his leather suit is still open as he walks onstage; he tends to forget about things like that, but there is no time. Also, since the crowd is already worked into such a manic rage, what better to satiate them than the sight of CT’s loveworm? It is like his music: hard yet soft.

CT’s voice bleeds through the loudspeaker.

“People of earth: I come to you as an ambassador…from the planet of ROCK!”

With that, Grog slams the bass and the drums are off and running like a wild, hungry dog.

Let me tell you about the sound of Wolf Rainbow.

It is loud but it is a harmonious loudness. It is like the most beautiful woman in the world beating you up with her hair.

At the concerts of Wolf Rainbow, I curl up in a little ball like I’m trying to keep myself from vomiting. But what I’m really trying to do is hold on. When I hear CT’s voice going up through the clouds and then back down and up again at a dizzying rate, like an airplane showing off, I can’t help but feel that I’m suspended on the edge of a cliff or somewhere similar where the beauty before me comes with the price of danger. A lot of people who know about the view from the tip-top of a bridge or tall building are dead, because they climbed up in order to jump off. But sometimes I wonder if they truly planned on jumping or if the view was just so beautiful that they realized what a wide big net beauty is, and then wanted so badly to be caught by it. That’s how I feel about Wolf Rainbow–I’m afraid of falling into it, becoming the music and then losing myself there.

At this moment I feel a short kick at my ribs. Sister. She must have said HASHISH420.

“Look at your pupils. Do you need a doctor?”

I shake my head and get up, attempting to hug her.

She steps backwards and covers her torso protectively. “Please stay away. Let’s just get this done. What a complete nightmare. Do you know that reporters get a hold of my cell phone number? No matter how many times I change it? Normally I only pick up for people I know, which is, well, you, and doctors’ offices, but this time I answered every call. “Yes,” I told them, “I do have a comment on the latest fiasco: you and your boyfriend are crazy and I am publicly disowning you.”

“We got married,” I said. “Remember?” I would’ve invited Sister to the wedding if there had been time, but I didn’t actually become aware of the ceremony until it had already happened. Mescaline is crazy that way. Grog showed me a video, though. CT and I were slathered with divine jelly and rebirthed together as twins from the Womb of the Worm.

Sister stretches out her arm, handing me a manila folder with a pen attached. “I’ll show you where to sign.” Suddenly she cringes and rubs her temples. The band is starting in on a particularly heavy number titled “Reign of the Pig Women.” “My God,” she whimpers, “Do you have some aspirin, some water?”

The Worm Eternal is wise and sneaky. He will leave you all alone on auto-pilot and then suddenly come back to help you when you’re least expecting it. “Yes, one second,” the Worm Eternal tells me to say to Sis, and then I go over to Zapruder (one of the road crew) and ask him does he have anything. I’m in luck because he just scored five minutes ago, a great score since our entire stash had to be replaced due to the cop incident.

Deep down, I suppose I hadn’t really been dealing with the fact that Sister wanted to break contact at all; in fact I was in denial right until the second the Worm Eternal slid into my brain. “This is your last chance,” it told me. “You might never see her again if you don’t do something drastic.”

I return a few minutes later with a glass of cold water. “Here Sister,” I say, trying to seem nonchalant. I’m worried my voice sounds robotic since I’m being so careful with my words. I drop two pills into her hand. She’s still holding her temple and cringing but when she sees the pills she cringes even more.

“Are these aspirin p.m. or something? I just want regular aspirin; I don’t want to feel drowsy.”

“It’s regular,” I tell her, “it’s just from Europe. Most generic pills in Europe are neon green with a pagan star in the center.”

She swallows them and opens the folder and clicks the pen above the line where I need to sign.

“OK,” I nod. “I just want to read it first.”

She scowls. “That’s an oddly responsible thing for you to do.”

I pretend to look at the words for several minutes until she leaps up off the couch, a very high leap. “Is it warm in here?” she asks. Her face and body have flushed to an alarming but expected bright orange and her pupils look like giant Kalamata olives. “It is,” I reply, and she removes her shirt.

That’s when I see that she is only wearing one breast.

I open my mouth to say something, something loving that also expresses my utter grief at her loss, but she’s staring up at the loudspeakers. “This is a really great song,” she yells, which is not what I was expecting Sister to say.

“It is,” I reply gingerly, “this drum solo will last for approximately forty minutes.” Sister suddenly seems so changed; I’m not sure whether to talk to her in the careful way I’m used to or to just open up.

“Lets go watch them,” she says. It is almost a squeal, and is total confirmation that she’s most certainly in a Wormhole and I need to jump in with her. So we go to the curtain and I yell to Zapruder that she is my sister, and he checks out the still-inflated side of her bra and gives me a thumbs up.

A few hours later we are back on the bus driving to California, and Sister is more talkative than ever. She has told us all about her breast cancer and the mastectomy, and when Grog says she is still totally doable they start flirting and take off her bra so Grog can draw a nipple over her scar tissue with a Sharpe marker. She thinks it’s hilarious. It’s so good to see Sister smile.

When the curtain on Grog’s bunk finally reopens and the two of them come out, she’s still in great spirits, which for Sister means that she is in a completely altered state.

“Sis,” she yells, putting her naked arms around me and bringing my face to her half-bosom. She rocks me back and forth like a mother for a little while.

“What were Mom’s last words?” she asks. I was only four at the time but I remember them easily.

“Mother looked at me and said, ‘I’m doing this because of you. You drove me to this.’”

Sis completely cracks up. CT and Grog start laughing too, and before I know it tears are pouring down my face because I can’t stop laughing either. “That’s ridiculous!” Sister says through her laughter. I nod.

“What’s this?” Sister asks Grog as he hands her the tube to a hookah, but then before he can answer she sticks it into the side of her mouth like it’s that spit-sucky thing at the dentist and lets it hang out there while she continues to talk.

“You know, no offense, but I didn’t want you to live with me. I felt like I had to take you in, because Mom was such a horrible person, and I didn’t want to seem like a horrible person too. But it ruined so many things for me. If I hadn’t been forced to grow up right then and be a parent, things would be way better for me now I think, much much better.”

I have been in the stomach of the Worm Eternal long enough to know that Sister doesn’t mean this in a personal way, that in fact the Worm Eternal has itself entered her ear and is speaking to me through her so that I will have Greater Understanding. CT gently squeezes my hand and whispers “W-I-E” into my ear, which means Wriggle-In-Effect, as in, the Worm is actively present and working.

Suddenly, the bus stops and Fractyl Clymber runs back wearing a headdress of swan feathers. “Dudes, the sun is coming up and there are all these flat rocks and I think it’s really cleansing. Like, I sort of took an accidental detour; I mean it’s totally cool, I totally know where we are, in relative terms. But I think it was like, meant to be, because it is so fucking pure out there right now, and I think if we all just go out there and sit it’ll be great, like I might even be able to forget that that ever happened, I mean.”

When we file out of the bus, the light of dawn seems to sober Sister up a little bit. It’s easy not to sober up in the bus-light and bus-air; the bus is a sort of intoxicant itself. As we walk out onto the rocks Sister looks down at the light shining on her scar tissue and begins to cry.

But Grog is not about to let this happen. “Lie down, beautiful woman,” he says. “Bloom like a flower.” He walks to her and parts her legs with his hands and tells her to say it. “I’m a blooming flower, say those words.”

And she does. The sun is coming up brighter than I’ve ever seen it, and it is all hitting Sister, her scarred parts and her whole parts, everything. And Grog’s face moves into her bloom like a hummingbird, and CT walks over with his erection peeking tall and shadowy from his still-untied leather suit, and he moves his face into her bloom like a hummingbird too, and I stretch out on a nearby rock like I do backstage at the concerts. Sister’s noises are a lot like the music of Wolf Rainbow, except this time I do jump into the noise, I get lost in the sounds and become them totally. My ears eat every drop of her pleasure.

When we get back on the bus we’re all pretty tired. CT and I retire to the clam bed. Sister hugs me and I hug her too and it’s cosmic. When we hug, my boob fits into her boob-hole.

Several state lines later when CT and I wake up, Fractyl Clymber tells me that Sis asked him to let her out at the Reno airport. She left me a note saying she was going to a hospital in Arizona, and that Grog gave her a lot of money in the form of gold coins (Grog refuses to be paid in any other type of currency). She also wrote that she would call me sometime soon, or that I could call her when I was ABLE to talk. The word “able” was bolded and underlined.

The biggest surprise was that she’d left me a white leotard. I knew with one look that it had been Mother’s. I smelled it, hoping that it would somehow still smell like her, even though she’d been dead for over two decades and was mostly a horrible mother. But it smelled like the bus’s incense-laden air. I put it on beneath my leather suit, though, and pretty soon because of rubbing on the leather all day the leotard acquired a very comfortable smell, like a drowsy horse.

A few weeks later we were able to stay in the hospital with Sister for a week. It was weird-Worm Eternal-serendipity because we’d long ago been scheduled to go to the desert to film a new video for the upcoming album La Muerte es Suerte. Then, during filming, the python wrapped around Grog’s shoulders totally bit him on the johnson, just like Grog is always worried will happen to CT when we go sleep in fields. The snake’s handler didn’t understand it at all; she said there was no reason in the whole world why a well-fed python would want to bite a human in that physical region, and asked Grog what kind of cologne he used and questions of that nature as he and the snake were being taken away to the hospital on a stretcher, which ended up being the very same hospital Sister was staying at.

So we cancelled some tour dates and I got to sit by Sister and hold her hand during and after treatment, sometimes holding her as she got sick and left drops on my leather suit that were a nice type of reminder stain. And beneath the suit I always wore Mother’s leotard. Late at night when the cable got boring and Sister was asleep and CT and the rest of the gang were doing opium in the bus parked in the hospital lot (“We can do as much of anything as we want, you know? We’re in the parking lot of a fucking hospital” Fractyl Clymber happily declared) I often thought about how family and Mother and Sister were like my suit and my leotard, skin under skin under skin, this onion whose layers can be peeled back for the Worm Eternal to help me understand. And understanding is beautiful. In fact, its beauty is dizzying in fast, airplane-stunt ways: the beauty of CT’s locks spiraled in a hurricane of rock, the beauty of my sister so strong while her body is weak, the beauty of Mother’s white leotard becoming the color of camels and tea and milk beneath my leather suit. “The beauty beneath”; it is something I know. I say it to CT all the time now, and of course he understands. CT has always understood.