In a Bathroom with Adrienne Shelley

Based on a dream, of a bathroom, in which I was with Adrienne Shelley

Somehow the two of us are locked in a bathroom, a ceiling-less room that opens up to a grand opal moon and indigo sky, but that’s only a glimpse of colour you see sometimes out of the corner of your eye when you turn your head and try to think of all the things you want to make you cry but you can’t because your thoughts have grown stale your thoughts have gone dry no matter how hard you try to see things with fresh eyes washed clean, like the doors in-between that can only be opened when you have Blake like dreams.

 

Adrienne Shelly and I are alone and the room is porcelain white, shades of grey blue. Not even our clothes give off any colour, it is like the room you were born in if no one brought flowers and cards and you were yanked out and opened your eyes to the grey frame of the bed your mother lies in, the whiteness of the milk your mouth opens agape to welcome and the blue sky outside that is a little overcast and promises rain. But in the bathroom we are locked in Adrienne Shelly’s hair is burning continuously it's amber glow- the heat emanating.  We’re completely alone and everything was silent and if the door opens everything would be ruined it would be over, like two young lovers wrapped in their virginal passion about to give everything to each other until one of them says’ hang on a minute I just gotta take a piss’. Someone needing a piss would destroy this moment. Even if the bathroom door opened and we walked into the wilderness of an amazon rainforest where time cannot be told because there are still some parts of the rainforest, like darkness, where if you were placed into you could not look at the watches of men or look at the expiry dates of food to know the year, it is year-less. If the door opened and I walked into the Last Supper like a welcome prodigal son and Jesus Christ himself is two thousand years later sat on a park bench sharing his roll with the squirrels and pigeons, or into the city of Atlantis or in the focal point of the Trojan war or any number of moments in time captured it can wait because this is the moment I am in. and the one I must see through before I enter another.

 

There’s nothing that needs to be said here, there’s nothing that even needs to be done, not like the other night when I watching a herd out outlaws run from the popping of a thousand little toy guns. Her big dark eyes are looking at me and I keep thinking what is it you’re thinking what is it you see.

 

Something comes into my mind throughout the silence but the conversations of looking at someone not needing to say anything because you ‘ve already spend a good portion of your life listening to people’s problems of living and dying, caught by ear throughout the fear of saying something real something that couldn’t possibly exist outside of the weather, the price of gas, the recession, the economic boom, the sugar content of cereals, the rules of dating, the secret Santa and office party at Christmas, the thoughts of some film that means nothing to me or to you or to anyone, the age of when you want to be married by, about fashion, about the block in your toilet about the block in your mind. And what comes into my mind is that I do not want to f**k Adrienne Shelly, and I’m saying this in the ay that people do not say people that are dead are beautiful, but that they were beautiful and when me and Adrianne shelly sat in that porcelain dream we were not thinking in the past tense but we were in the present and so even if it does cross my mind that I want to f**k Adrienne Shelly, much like the woman from a Henry Miller Parisian labyrinth, a grotto of lice and syphilis in which I probably convinced myself that every woman was a w***e and every man a writer or a pimp, where I saw a blonde woman on the street and tried to convince her to have sex with me right there, right outside the Hotel De Nord because I had woken up and realised that I was dreaming and that maybe she was also dreaming and someone real outside of the dream who had also been reading Henry Miller in the last few weeks and probably thought I was a pimp not a writer, and later woke up thinking how strange to be told by someone in my dream that I WAS in a dream then have him absurdly try to seduce me.

 

There’s a toilet in the locked bathroom and also a bath, a small little square mirror is above the sink, one you have to bend your knees to see yourself in the ones in prison cells or in little lost bathrooms who can’t find anymore except when you close your eyes. And I used to think why do you not see people shitting in films or pissing, why do writers exclude the moment of lying in a bath in the night which is often as intimate and sensual as reading a book itself, why do they not describe the stillness of the hot water that ripples from time to time and the steam that swirls off their arms like some fantastic fourth human torch extinguished.

 

In most dreams boy have hard-ons pushing through their pants like a bum that spits and raves and dribbles and rants and maybe when they grow older they too will see the smoulder of a redheaded girl in an unknown porcelain bathroom silent sung tune, a momentous poem of the crazed whirlwind imagination dune and as I’m realising if you use the words neon or night you can create something real you can do something right, show the way, shine the light.

 

So when the time comes for me to leave the bathroom which I never really leave but walk out into a lice infested mouth or though the Chungking Hong Kong streets where workers get ready for closing time at midnight I lift up my shirt and Adrienne shelly is also lifting up hers too and as we move closer to one another we embrace and I can feel her cool skin against mine, my head resting on her shoulder next to her burning hair which I’m, lighting cigarettes off. And her body is frail and thin and I think of all the words that can be placed next to each other to create something like the painter mixes the paints or the composer chooses the instruments to sound together or the mildew of midnight swarms over faintly meadows and skylark wonders burrowing heaven ground step like blue sound croak.