I should have been a dancing girl . . .

I should have been a dancing girl. I should have waved my skirts in the Moulin Rouge, shook my money maker at the whores who sat before me in the halls of inequity and the bedrooms of the rich. I should have been a barroom darling in Nazi lace and kosher leather, singing songs about the war wearing blue stockings and someone else’s Swiss feathered cap. I should have dragged my suitcase down train station platforms running for trains that some Angel should have stopped in their tracks, but instead still ran ran ran all the way to very gates of hell! I should have sat in Parisian salons drinking vermouth or absinthine.

The company I would have kept would have been boorish but useful, their eyes falling on the fact this poet didn’t write about breasts but owned a small neat pair of their own; and it would have appalled them. It would have disgusted them more than any of Rimbaud’s talk of shit or piss of foul discharges which render the owner of them filthy in the sight of the moral invalids who bless the bread at the altar of the Church of the sacred virgin on a Sunday, but by Monday are dropping their pantaloons and comparing the size of their wrinkled elderly members against those of their younger, wishful acolytes in the schools and the vestries before the saying of psalms and hail mary’s.

Oh, yes! I should have been a pure Loretta wearing sevens on her blessed beer-soaked sleeves. I should have hawked cigarillos to baseball players by the banks of the walls of the holy house of the Yankees! Perhaps then I could have captured that diamond of youth! Perhaps then I could have lived twenty two years and three days, and with the help of a little shot of something strong, something bitter, something wild and freeing, I could have danced a dance for the ages.

Well. That chance has passed now. I never dance the can can in the Parisian fields of those who toil at the dick and balls of culture, or at least what passed for it in those days when things were more honest. More French. More me. I admire the French, you know. I admire their taste for revolution! I admire their shocking devotion to preserving beauty at the cost of dignity. I admire the fact that instead of losing the Louvre, instead of losing the beauty of Notre Dam and the crystalline shapes of Mont St Michel, they folded like a cheap card table and opened the door the Nazi menace. They were going to lose anyhow, they might as well have saved something of value to the eye and the heart. In the underground bars and the cellars and the backrooms they hatched plans to save both beauty and Jews; to save both Europe and something of their honor. I would not be alive if not for the French.

My grandfather would have perished if not for a French doctor, his underground moral sensibilities and a man with a hand that should have been drawing a reproduction Mona Lisa, but instead was forging passports for fourteen year old boys and twelve year old girls, to get them into a country that didn’t want them, but was unlikely to outright murder them, at least not if they couldn’t do it by proxy. I had enough of Europe quite early on. I think I have had enough of Europe for today, but there are stories to be told if I am going to write this damned tale of my life, and the story of before my life is as much part of it, perhaps more, than the tiny story that will unfold today, no doubt, as the day passes into night and San Francisco sits soaked and silent here where there are no mice, but roaches abound.

I think I prefer to talk about dancing! I was never much of a dancer. I was not of stock that danced. My blood was stagnant in the pits of eastern Europe for generations. Some of it found its way from Greece, somehow, the rest of it stubbornly destined for destruction, I fear. I was always too stuffed up in my soul to dance like I was as free as I hoped to be. I feared being seen as foolish. Laughter to me as like molten lava. It is too late now, though I long for laughter. I have developed a biting sense of humor. I dip my head towards those I love like parrot, wanting it patted in reassurance. I am both fearsome and a coward. I fear annihilation yet I am too tired to keep on moving forward.

In short, I am stuck, stationery, failing to waft a gauzy scarf in front of my face, or point a toe towards hell, or raise a hand to the heavens. I do not bend like a willow nor flow like the ink from this pen in my hand. I stand here, like a statue from the gardens of the Acropolis, still as stone and looking on the property of the dead, yet I am only dying, slowly freezing. Perhaps my features will turn to limestone (I was not built to be rendered in marble) and my eyes look out, seeing yet unseen, unnoticed by all but the most observant of souls. A spy, not in the house of love, nor the dwelling places of the holy, but in the realms of the dead who lack rest. I might not dance, but who needs dance when you can see and hear? Who needs movement of the body when the soul is free?

Freedom has been my life’s work. I sought freedom to write, not like a woman should write, but how I wanted to write. I have no interest in producing tales for children, or things to be consumed on tedious journeys by plane or train. I could never read in the car, I would end up turning green and needing to push my head out the window like a needy and fragile Afghan hound! I don’t wish to write restrained comedies of manners, nor thoughtful treatise on the subject of love and family, home and hearth. I want to write like a swashbuckler, a meatheaded man, a pioneer, an explorer. I want to write like someone who cannot create life from my own body but instead has to settle for art and words, poetry and the grace to be found in form. The ministering bodies of Angels settle on these male shoulders and give them creation through art. I cover myself in honey and wait for the bees to come. Though the room of my own is nice and safe and pleasing, damnit I want some words of my own!

In the dark of my dreams I die nightly in hails of bullets. I feel no pain, only impact. I hide behind half destructed walls and I hold my breath amidst the rubble of war. In the dark of my dreams wolves in the clothes of men keep watch over dark and dingy realms of the underworld, where they keep women and children chained to walls. There is no escape in the dark of the night when the soul flees the body and is called to wander the halls of hell! This is my other life. This is my nightmares bourn out of suffering and pain for an entire lifetime.

I have little family, and that which I do have is bound to walk away and leave me. I failed at every romantic escapade. I have few friends, and those which I do have can only tolerate me in small doses. I am not socially awkward, but I hate society. The hawing and hee-ing of the chattering classes makes me want to vomit. They either want to use my talent to kick-start theirs, or else see what they can get out of me for free. No one wants to pay the piper, nor the writer, it seems. Better to do a mediocre rip-off and leave me to my meanderings. Punks? Don’t make me laugh. They have all become masterful merchants of rips and tears, noise and destruction. They sell rebellion and the fools eat it up like banana pudding. I have little respect for most of them, except Iggy Pop, Bob Dylan, Cheetah Chrome ( I could never resist a Dead Boy) and Patti Smith. Patti and I are ideologically opposed to each other, but the girl can turn a phrase neater than the leg on a Queen Anne chair! There are others, but most of them are dead. Arthur Rimbaud is still the Lord and Master of all he surveyed, and the ultimate poet of the ages and I will stand on Verlaine’s coffee table and shout it to the depths of hell!

I write a lot about what I should be writing. I suppose I am getting this out of my system while my mind is still fresh this morning. I am getting to it. I am an old maid now, but that is not the way it has always been. I should have been a dancing girl. I should have worn slinky dresses, instead of being constantly dressed for war or disaster. The idea of wearing shoes I cannot run in makes me feel utterly naked. To try to save my life wearing gold lamé or a cute little number which hugs my lack of curves is more than ridiculous, it is downright dangerous. I have rarely felt a day go past where I was not utterly justified in thinking my life and freedom were in imminent danger. I should have been a bar room girl. I should have worn a bee-bop top, with a 1950s white peter pan collar in mint polyester, holding a tray of cigarettes on a strap around my neck. I should have poured beers and whiskey for men who like to think they drink too much but who instead just buzz around bars like bottle flies, flying in the faces of girls who serve drinks and girls who drink drinks and stomping their testosterone soaked stupidity on the heads and faces of men who simply want to be somewhere other than their living room sofas alone. These hands are not unsoaked by Guinness. I know what it is like to come home stinking of smoke and stale booze, but I moved on as fast as my denim-clad legs could carry me.

I danced to my own beat, in my own way. I stood in clearings with pagans and I looked into the bastions of education and religion, but I never outstayed my welcome. I am not headed for salvation, nor am I doomed, I don’t think to Abaddon. I am a wanderer. I thrive in exile. I might not move prettily, but I moved constantly. Perhaps it is the staying still, the running out of steam, which has ended me? I guess we will find out. I should have been a dancing girl. I sat drinking Apricot wine in bars in Hamburg, I downed shots of strong liquor with women who had gangsters as husbands who had been shot in the stomach but survived it all only to still somehow have the stench of fragility on their breath. I should have danced with a ribbon at a wedding of my own, instead of wearing widow’s weeds of black as I signed what might as well have been a death wish as a marriage certificate. I should have danced the dying swan alone in a forest in the dark in Bavaria, instead of running back with a broken leg to the home of my father. I should have been a dancer. I should have been lighthearted and full of grace, instead I wore a name which was not mine upon shoulders which didn’t look strong enough to take the burden, and instead changed form and shape, country and face and did what I could to discover the root of love, the essence of loyalty and the true value of The Word.

I wish I had been a dancer. I would have been called Loretta and grown up in Ohio. I would have hawked smokes at baseball games and slung popcorn as a side hustle. I would have served stale pie from lukewarm grimy cabinets under lying signs that said ‘World’s Greatest Pie!’ and bussed tables until my feet bled and my hands ached and I knew the value of an honest day’s work. Instead I am a toad. Not a Princess or a solid agent of Capitalism. I sit here toadily writing my story and manipulating words to suit my ends. I don’t know if I have a dance in me. Not under skies holy, or in circles pagan and profane. I can hear the music, but I can’t move my body.

I should have been a dancer, but it’s too late now.