Roseemerald

Contents

CHAPTER 1  

CHAPTER 2  

CHAPTER 3  

CHAPTER 4  

CHAPTER 5  

CHAPTER 6  

CHAPTER 7  

CHAPTER 8  

CHAPTER 9  

CHAPTER 10  

CHAPTER 11  

CHAPTER 12  

CHAPTER 13  

CHAPTER 14  

CHAPTER 15  

CHAPTER 16  

CHAPTER 17  

CHAPTER 18  

CHAPTER 19  

CHAPTER 20  

CHAPTER 21  

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

CHAPTER 1

We hit the road about twelve noon, twelve hours shy of midnight. RoseEmerald was tinkering in the passenger seat, while she was dreaming into the pavement being swallowed up in the hood of the car. RoseEmerald was like a turned page in a children’s illustrated classic. The blue ink around the square borders of the pages was the natural blue shadows around the lips of her emerald eyes--eyes that lifted at the purr of a compliment. Pretty reactive, I’d say, planting my lips on her lashes.

We passed by scenery that took on the colors of layered shelves of books. Red rested on yellow, green reclined on blue. Rows of pubescent trees lingered against the red bricked storefronts like reluctant children on the first day of school. RoseEmerald tossed her gaze out the window and her enchantment scattered among the leaves like startled birds.

I barely had time to catch the pregnant clouds dancing against the windshield before they quickly slipped behind the roof of our car. Our car was named Hardy, so if I mention Hardy to you, you’ll know it’s the faithful character on four wheels, not exactly 32 lbs. of pressure a piece. Sometimes more like 25, or 38 on a hot day. Speaking of hot days, those pregnant clouds looked as if they were getting ready to give birth to pairs of hot marshmallow babies.

RoseEmerald was making love with the wind. She could achieve satisfaction commingling with the molecules of a common breeze. This particular onrush of air was the result of a coupling that occurred roughly in the year of indiscriminate intimacy, when RoseEmerald was experiencing her first sign of menstruation, and was only now catching up with time in its current setting.

The trees we passed by, with incredibly strange speed, bore a human presence that was both welcoming and curious. We hardly gave those trees time enough for religious contemplation, as we sped by like heavy glass spirits with a mission beyond the horizon. RoseEmerald was planting an expensive smile on her face, the way in which she stretched her lips like a dollar converting its green paper thinness into a dozen bought items.

RoseEmerald’s breasts were youthful, the way they gently expanded her tee shirt with joy and anxious excitement. Her long brown hair cascaded down her shoulders and forked at the highest reaches of either breast, like a forging river parted by stones. The wisps of her hair were as vivid as the hurried splashing’s of the river’s rush to sites unseen.

I imagined lifting the fine, smooth cover of RoseEmerald’s face and reading between the miniature crow’s-feet signaturing her eyes.

Trail beneath my feathers, my love, she said.

Clouds were keeping an appointment with solar energy, on the hood of Hardy. I could swear that I saw a sliver of disembodied hand sweep across Hardy’s chiseled endowments, and almost appear to want to communicate with every VIP on the verge of mental estrangement, daring one another to take a quick walk see and do on the other side.

True, I never had an experience with the transformation of childhood repression into something more tangible than a raw emotion, but RoseEmerald was a sort of sunburst of wet emotion on her own part, that part being nothing less than the part between the evolution of a specific species and the cosmology of the unique character of the universe.

I could have swung my spare tire over to the side of the road and named my unwary companion a blue rhapsody of thought, but I supposed that my current rapture with the guides, the lesser Gods, was going to be accommodating an energy newly created.

Instead of focusing my eyes on the difficult, monotonous pavement of cheerless highway, I sank my gaze into the flickering blue-green sparkle of RoseEmerald’s wandering contemplations. I didn’t need to look directly into her naked eyes in order to drift melodiously downward into the sea pools gathered beside me. Irregardless of my inattentiveness to the road and its countless numbers of instructional signs and symbols, I was clear about my destination. I had no less than Mother Gaea--Mother Earth Goddess--beside me, huddled into the bucket seat of Hardy’s sublime purrings on the road.

RoseEmerald went to reach for the passenger mirror and unfold her reflection like the mystifying blossom of the lotus flower. Her image toppled out of the exposed glass like a vast army of sperm dispersed by savage excitation. Her image drenched me with the kind of female moisture that all eager men revel in. Slices of peyote dreams cut me to the quick, and with just the slightest turn of the steering wheel, I was able to avoid an iguana on a pedestrian trek across the highway. Thank God for the compassion of Mother Earth.

Soil dust burdened my eyelids, painlessly. RoseEmerald had a small nipple of a problem wrenched between her teeth. Her tongue was making lazy attempts to dislodge the foreign matter, poking stubbornly between the guard lines of her right-sided eyeteeth. Once again I was reminded of my mission, a destination awaiting me in accordance with the transparent rules of the universe.

RoseEmerald appeared to be suspended in the nether-netherworld of processing a great deal of information with the barest of instruments. The barest of instruments was needed in order to feel out the truth when there are hoards of information to sift through (although, in her tongue and cheek manner, RoseEmerald would have more aptly referred to it as whores of information, for who other than a whore would hold bare essence equivalent to sincere conviction?).

Positive reinforcements tumbled out the pocket of her consciousness and scattered across her mouth like a somber bit of news. Say, wouldn’t it promote our pride on acid-wings if we could become the devil’s advocate for some serious pain and discovery? But, then again, we could become a risk to cosmic consciousness should we infuse our heads with religious contemplations, and wander too far from the unwritten lines of creation. By God, we could become converts to formalized religion, if not stable patrons of the spirit. RoseEmerald was feeling a doll’s house of personal instability, which was only accented by St. John’s hand on her shoulder, while he was busy disengaging us from unconventionality with the stamina of a Fred Astaire tapping away on God’s holy dance floor.

I was not about to interrupt RoseEmerald’s ‘What should I do with my life?’ stream of butter consciousness, especially when the better part of the butter was guiding my hands on the wheel, which, in turn, was presiding over the wheels of the road. Especially when I was trying to be most helpful toward RoseEmerald as she was attempting to answer the dumfounded questions of living matters from several different levels at once. I had finally come to that gratifying shelf of self-appreciation, where one is able to enhance one’s self-esteem by cunning stealth, and thereby notice, from such a high perspective, the areas in which one excels. A butterfly collided with Hardy, and left a rare rainbow of bloody essence across the windshield.

Oh, Pooh Bear is nowhere and everywhere. So there. RoseEmerald touched the glass barrier between her fingertip and the splattered butterfly, and I swear to God, for real, the butterfly came together and flew away into the reducing shyness of the day.

The Tiger Eye is gold and makes for a blistery day. Wouldn’t you say? RoseEmerald said.

I did not want to foster any abnormal inhibitions. With the full most utterance of tongue, I responded.

CHAPTER 2

I must tell you right now that most of what RoseEmerald talked about was meaningful only to those most comfortable with love. Miles back we had picked up a hitchhiker standing on a bunch of bare toes with the nails cut off. After we stopped and offered him a lift, we were careful not to panic as he climbed into the back seat. He informed us that he was heading for Arathwa, Wyamine, and should we oblige him the remainder of the way, he would be sure to help us set up camp that night and wallop with the best of them under a full moon. Having taken up residency in our back seat, with his thumb still locked in a rather provocative way, the hitchhiker proceeded to expound upon the moral obligations of being a B.C. prophet in an A.D. world. Emulating Jesus Christ was slowly but surely killing him to death, in spite of the redundancy. Glancing over at RoseEmerald, I caught her wordless commentary on the disadvantages of allowing a mind tripper of a trek to turn into an ego trip of the utmost degree.

RoseEmerald pulled me in with her eyes, with her persuasive Howard Keel, Big Fisherman, Technicolor, Panavision alias Simon Peter Entertainment Eyes. Short of being dramatic, she was alerting me to the spectacular sensationalism of our back seat hitchhiker’s attempt to bleed wine from his own orbits in true Gethsemane agony. If only Hardy had room for eight venerable olive trees, we might have immortalized the moment with Laurel Gamore, so as to cleanse ourselves of all the blood spilled in war, and replace it with a symbol of victory over the flesh.

Obviously, the hitchhiker was wanting of a name upon which he could nail himself to the crossbeams in the cushion of the back seat; his railings rivaled the melodious melodies of Hardy’s motorized musings, as that beloved behemoth of a car carried us across the Styx and Stones of Highway Whatever.

RoseEmerald slipped me an Hamamelis virginica on the rocks, alluding to the more common Witch Hazel and uttered under her breath that divining rods were currently in fashion, and used as protection against evil influences. I met her utterance with the hope to mend a broken heart and cool the passions. J.C. in B.S. (i.e., the Back Seat) picked up his cue with itching ears, and rounded off the sentence with three yes, Lords, two keep the faiths, and a Holy Root.

I suppose that fidelity comes in all forms and packages. Everyone, these days, is forcibly trying to remain faithful to one thing or another, and to guard against unwanted temptations. I like to think of myself as remaining faithful to lust, as this topic of faithfulness is certainly less manipulatory than most others. At least with lust, one strives for sexual desire, which was the first desire of mankind to catch the attention of God, and the first desire with which humankind was to be paid in full; like a cash register, I always felt that ‘paid in full’ had a nice ring to it.

I caught RoseEmerald’s little sideshow as she attempted to converse with our hitchhiker’s thumbs in the back seat with her own suggestive play of Saturn figurations. From the abandoned look in the hitchhiker’s eyes, it was highly doubtful that he was aware of RoseEmerald’s pointed commentaries on the themes of organized religion. Not that RoseEmerald was in the habit of attacking one’s customs when it came to religion; on the contrary, RoseEmerald thought it wise to steer clear of such formidable obstructions, just like she sharply forewarned me to do as I took my eyes off the road, and Hardy’s tires suddenly gripped the curb of The Church of the Epiphany.

The church was closed. Thank God. Had it been opened this early in the week, I might have plowed into the parked car of a patron of religious arts, God forbid. Had this been ancient times and cars were misplaced in time, I might have obliviated wise man Solomon’s means of transportation to and from the 24/7 Institute of Higher Thinking.

Musing about the displacement of complex elements in space and time, I now associate ‘Institutes’ as a place for the disorganized of minds to worship under one organized roof of clinical thinking. In such a scenario, assuming that I was in a proper space of time, I would have rammed not into the vehicle of a patron of religious worship, but perhaps the vehicle of some infamous schizophrenic, better known for his private and most potent discourses with God on the dusty, dirty streets of Realistic City, where both man and God can really get down to the core of things and crack nuts until their meaty, juicy centers are fully exposed to the masses.

But enough of wishful thinking near accidents of irreligious relevance. I had a job to keep Hardy hard on the road of life, not soft on the sidewalks of disparate hopes and dreams.

Besides, RoseEmerald’s colorful configurations of Saturn/Venus diplomacy made for amusing sermons on the mount in their own right. Take, for example, the sublime sobriety of RoseEmerald’s vertical hand movements behind the seat in front of J.C.; the prominent up/down motion of finger suggestion was of a sway persuasive enough to allot me a comfortable grasp of aesthetics. No dull, unperceptive natures in those movements. No, F.U. was clearly interacting with J.C., in spite of the blockage of the mountain between them; for if one has faith enough to say to the mountain: ‘Be ye removed,’ then nothing is impossible.

RoseEmerald cast me one of her wonderful, naughty, self-indulgent hedonisms of a wink, and suggested by her coy smile that I slip the connotation into a sly nature of my soul and cut the remaining crap off with a bold stroke of the wheel. J.C., in the Back Seat, tossed to and fro like a reed carried about with every wind of doctrine, except J.C. would have been much better off if Doc Holiday was providing the substance and not Oral Roberts.

Outside of the spectrum of religion stands God’s early Ghost, waiting for the world to wake up backwards and put its shoes on forwards and walk into the library of God’s heart, J.C. said under a morsel of thought, fit for the mortal flesh.

Heavy, I harkened, heavy with sleep. But mine was not the sleep of death; mine was the sleep in the night, where abideth also the drunken in the night.

RoseEmerald was of quick understanding, and caught my references to the Lord, without the bait to tempt the biter. As though on cue, she served our brittle conversation with some matzo of the soul.

Sleep on now, and take your rest, for the hour is at hand. RoseEmerald was quick with her words so as not to betray the truth.

See, J.C, in the Back Seat, was pretending to catch on. He could fit, snugly, into the grooves of our giddy conversation with a great grasping of ill-humor and still remain steadfast to his cause; a cause which RoseEmerald suggested, by the sly and dainty curvature of her eyes, was more attuned to the free ride at hand than the bonded rhetoric of his tongue.

With a bolt of lightening speed, RoseEmerald offered to take J.C. as far as Wales, should he be that desperate for a lift.

Wales? J.C. questioned. Why should I ever want to travel to Wales by way of California?

Why, to fit into the title of our trek. For isn’t California the land of the rich, and isn’t Wales worthy of a more solemn pilgrimage?

If incomprehensibility is a garment of the soul, then there couldn’t have been a more perfect fit than the confusion worn around the circumference of J.C.’s face. Upon hearing RoseEmerald’s suggestion of a potentially meaningful pilgrimage to Wales, by the off beaten, extended route of California, J.C.’s sense of apostolicity spread across his conflicting demeanor like an arresting baptism. One could subtly detect the vindex injuriae flushing J.C.’s skin, ready to right the wrong turns made by the ill of good faith. Naturally. Of course. ‘Wales’ for the ‘wailings’ of the heart.

My position as driver (a position I assumed more with stately pleasure than country commitment--or as one might say in the underworld, a position I assumed more with the obligatory sense of taking ‘the spent’ out for a ride in the country) was undergoing a slight degree of ‘breeziness’ (especially if one considers a breeze to be not only the inflow of courtly, heavenly air through the vent window of life, but also as an easy task; a cinch; time-telling equivalent to a breeze of omniscience on the wrist; departing with ease; escaping without guilt, with a beautiful ‘breeze in’ beside me and a less than fortunate ‘breeze off’ in the back).

Yes, breeziness, with just a tinge of the cold northeast wind in its origin; from the sea; from which all of your basic religions sprang forth from with an element of surprise.

RoseEmerald took her gender to heart, and squeezed the feminine bejesus out of the Venus-Myrtus communis of her soul. This action certainly made her feel fertile, and if she had had a chaplet of fresh leaves and flowers, she would have worn it on her head merely for the sake of celebrating J.C.’s ignorance.

From her herb-mag days, she knew that myrtle, when carried, preserves love, in addition to youth and peace; and no one needed love more than a battered, religious icon of a man pontificating in the back seat of the universe.

How does it work? she asked herself, weighing the duality of good and evil in the chipped rimmed cup of her hands as she responded to the imaginary life force, the stuff of creation, around her, employing a day’s lesson into one measly second of the world. Voices came and went like a schizophrenic’s slippery walk-on into cue card curiosity. RoseEmerald could have simply chosen one voice at random and cornered it, and brought it down to its knees, and dissected it, or, at least, have taught it to obey in the name of all that is deified and anthropomorphized-politically correct, but she was feeling only partially omnipotent at the time and was willing to let bygones be bygones in the less than important pockets of the human race, for better or worse.

How does it work? she reiterated, without expecting to catch the fantasy flight on an existential dilemma. It works through the use of powers as yet not defined by science, man, or religion.

Sometimes a trek through the rough can result in a vain, egocentric attitude. A person can tend to feel that he/she alone is responsible for whatever serendipitous discoveries are made along the way. And even though I was never one to compare myself to the likes of Zoroaster, I could not help but ponder his stance in the dark, or anyone else’s for that matter. To the contrary, I felt to be more the coward when it came to looking at wild creations conjured up by the gods at a drop of a cup, than the hero.

CHAPTER 3

Whose idea was it to pick up J.C., stranded along the road like a big hulk of uncertainty, eager to get inside his own house and toss five-cent philosophy around as though it was nothing more than unnecessary afterbirth rejected by anything other than a loving mother? The enchantress, RoseEmerald, seemed use to licking her opponent, while at the same time toying with it in cat/mouse fashion, an action which only delighted me, considering that I was but a novice who had not yet taken the final vows of existential sainthood, but was, nonetheless, working hard at it, with all the fever of a Sisyphus locked in cunning debate.

RoseEmerald wasn’t about to settle for left turns, standing idle in front of idols of the church. The temple is one of the most mysterious of icons, but somehow under Hardy’s cries of havoc, the mysteries of the church seemed no more mystifying than the sirens of a fire station. Here was Hardy, rumbling a low rampage of discomfort, having been made to run circular errands around a street steeped in silver and blue shadows; here was RoseEmerald, unwrapped in silk and fine tension, snagged on a day’s drive of pop-up stress; here was I, full of the promise of dawn, even though dawn was long gone. The three of us alone would have made an ill-fitting trio of disoriented kings. But with J.C. shunning Judas in the Back Seat, we could have slipped into the whole of our daily selves and come out looking tweaked and quartered.

J.C. mentioned that the church is bright and full of the promise of resurrection. At the moment, I could have forfeited resurrection altogether and lay as lumpy as a log in the back seat, with revelation kicked out the passenger door and smarting on the pavement.

RoseEmerald upped revelation all on her own by picking up on my thoughts and exclaiming that science has yet been able to explain all of the secrets of sleep, even though that is what human beings spend most of their time doing. She assessed the scientific merits of sleeping during periods of stress by suggesting that eating pickles before going to bed will cause nightmares, as will sleeping with your head to the South. Upon hearing this remark, J.C. let out a rebel cry that could have easily been confused for a bout of gas had not Hardy been close to full.

Don’t sleep in strange places, my mother use to tell me when I was a kid. It’s dangerous for the body and downright bad for the soul. Considering that I was naturally fond of my mother, I had always made it a habit to follow her words to a T. But that was all before trinities had slipped into my pattern of sleep, and a woman like RoseEmerald had emerged in the fog of my contemporary sleep. Even kids quacking over the rims of their cereal bowls to one another will tell you that dreams reveal much to the correct interpreter.

Driving on a coyote’s hide of a highway had been my occupation ever since crossroads had threatened to reveal the future, or have tempted drivers crossing them to re-examine their lives with their own built-in map of consciousness; hard drivers and soft drivers, fast drivers and slow drivers, have all got to take the advice of the open road at some point in their driving careers, less they find themselves broken in two by Victorian girls casting evil spells behind hot wheels, or Gothic priests chanting ominous benedictions from behind tinted windshields.

There are countless ways to drive just as there are countless rites in which sleep or dreams play a predominant part in handling the wheel; for, indeed, we can travel in our sleep if our driving record is clear of altercations on the road, including the otherwise unrecorded complications arising from hit and run, which can leave its strongest imprint on the consciousness of man in flight.

I was somewhat sorry for having convoluted our plot with haphazard driving, but I really couldn’t help it with J.C. hawking in the back about doves and how we, as human beings, are constantly slipping into and out of clothing, more times in the bedroom than before the altar of God, whom we are expected to approach, naked, on our hands and knees. Adultery was big on J.C.’s F.U.C.K. (i.e., Felonies Under Consent of our King) list, even though a host of other vices would have easily sufficed the critics. RoseEmerald was as relentless in her quest to antagonize the masses as she was relentless in her quest to inspire the selected few; and, with this in mind, she suggested that J.C. check the bibliography for titles relating to bible belting campaigning, and proceeded to turn towards me for further enlightenment.

But my current vibration was with the Mamas and the Papas in CA dreaming, moving about, literally, through the soft and peaceful atmosphere of having stopped (collided?) beside a church, after having passed a long, long way.

I tried to imagine the comfortable furnishings inside of the church, in the cool, soothing atmosphere secularly placed in the midst of the church in spite of the hot afternoon; the stairways of dust floating in the air like heavenly routes to Paradise; the tranquil echoes of the keepers of the faith bouncing off the walls like rubbery balls.

When I was a kid, absent from school due to a tail-end summer cold, I would often lie in bed and feel privileged upon hearing a bird song outside my window. It was as though this was the secret gift that I was allowed to experience for having had the courage to halt my education due to a sniffle. This was the domain of the songbird, whose sole occupancy of my backyard, when all good children are filed away at their desks in school, was sanctioned by a proclamation of notes as ancient as Adam’s first summer nap. For a split second, I wished to slip back into the checkered coverings of my childhood, and sneak into a dark passage of the church, and curl about like a cat in mystery.

Ah, but my waterbed of a prophetic dream, encouraging love with a nonchalant whimsy, poked the water of my own retentive seabed and warned me not to sleep for the next one hundred years. RoseEmerald longed to prevent disease in the sleeper, less there be no one left to save the earth. Pigeon feathers in the upturned soles of one’s shoes, soft grasses and plants scattered across the snowy desolation of one’s pillow, the herbal essence of incense from the Far East curling ragged time drifts of bedroom airs, were RoseEmerald’s mandatory, magical trinities, allowed to fester in order to make it possible for one to mystically escape through the mirrors from tragic world events. With a smile as expectant as a hollow flute, she would often simmer her eyes and say to me, You might get some strange looks for considering to live an alternative lifestyle, but, by George, it will forever keep you connected to God.

Picking up on my allusion to the Far East, RoseEmerald reminded me that a beam or visible rafter in the ceiling over a bed may prevent sleep and cause sickness if the house’s ch’i is so blocked directly above an unenlightened sleeper. Cocking one eye at the church, she seemed to consider my finer navigational skills, and prompted to remind me that in order to increase stability, calmness and prosperity, I should always make it a habit to point my head to the North when driving, even if the East has long been associated with religion, spirituality, sharp intelligence, and freedom of mind. In this direction, the Sun and Moon rise, which make it ideal for a nondriving, deep drowser to sleep East to West, following the natural course of the heavenly bodies.

J.C. tried to get a grip on that one, wishing to practice dream magic with the stroke of a Christian flair, but RoseEmerald was quick to remind him that pointing one’s head South during sleep would promote nothing but weariness, disease, and aggravated insomnia. Taking further civil action against the suit, RoseEmerald further emphasized that pointing one’s head to the West ensures love, spirituality, sensitivity and psychic abilities.

(How we got on the Four Points