and then it was just me and the 1975 Datsun 280z
He and I had to pull off, legs fusing to hot vinyl seats
Sweating for liquor and bodies
Inside there, anonymous musicians, all mustached
Played comically oversized instruments\
Music so filling the air, I could kiss it hello and goodbye as it passed all around me
Something like the hostess of a party touching your shoulder and a smile
Passing from guest to guest in greeting
On the floor in front of the makeshift stage
A cello was cracked wide open; its player lay dead inside
The corpse on ice with the beers
Someone dropped a coin into the mediated jukebox in the rear
Drawing themselves up as some unfulfilled caricature of constant starvation
So he and I swallowed down liquor
Dug our fingers through men in tuxedos and tails
Ladies burlesque and long, velvet gloves
Fingered through heavy curtains into an hourless outside
Settled back into sticky vinyl seats Gassing towards the next best show
And, oh, the car was quite the thing
Representation of an extreme state
His vision as driver was not privileged, flocking to view something different from the same
He and I, we knew desolation a diminishing resource
The places that harbored quiet, where nothing was happening
He and I exhausted from, terrified
These places could cause acclimation to stagnancy and fuse skin to vinyl
Those places made me feel sticky, him the same
Thus swearing to seek out some underbelly where the behind-the-times folks played
Where men wore too much, the women too little, and even better vice versa
And everyone wore powder on their cheeks
He and I sought those denied cabaret laws
Where men amused one another by tucking their genitals between their legs
Parading on makeshift stages lifting their petticoats and strutting
Music so loud one needn’t tongue for conversation, only liquor and sweat
Many nights he and I drove past barren into vehicular silence
Promising each other to never let thighs get too sweaty on the car seats
Until another curtained door appeared just before the sun broke ground
He and I fingered through heavy fabrics & birthed into a room
Hundreds shoulder to shoulder to crotch to crotch to hands & tongues &
silly hats & glittering masks, a piano played itself so loud
He and I ordered liquor through tin cans on string stretching from every corner
Even to the bartender, a dwarf in an exaggerated top hat
Sweat so thick in the air my lips chapped and cracked
I could feel the sodium in the space between my mouth and his
As if I had lost him at a crowded, sticky, salty beach and I heard a wave break somewhere
I reached for his hand among too many gloves laced and leather
I looked around and only saw masks and I called for him into the can but he answered in French
And soon I found him in the corner with a young pretty boy in his lap
his fingers in the boy’s mouth, the boy’s mask on his face, his hand lifting the boy’s petticoat
rubbing his tucked and hidden genitals
I knew he would not leave with me that night rather fused to the ass of this boy and here
Even amidst the music he dropped a coin into some jukebox
Succumbed to stagnancy but found it a pleasant sort of sticky
Stay here, I told him, I am going ahead
And took with me a pair of long lace gloves a sequined mask shining red slippers
Slid through the curtains and into the car removed all my clothes
Naked I pulled on the gloves slid on slippers fastened the mask
pulled needle and thread from the glove box Slowly carefully stitched each garment into my skin
The slippers first needle through satin through foot skin and back through satin until fused
Gloves sewn into the forearm skin crisscrossing to be sure of a strong hold against movement
Mask stitched into my cheeks around eyes thin forehead skin fused to my face eyes peeking
With the remaining thread sewed bare sticking leg skin into the hot vinyl seats
Vehicle and body completely fused by sweat and stitching
I would never again have to stand the discomforts of
Peeling my sticky thighs from these sticky seats
So I drove on bypassing curtained doorways
found facing dawn for the very first time
I came upon a deserted beach and drove onto the sand
vast abundance outside my windshield
Inside self-imposed deprivation unable to touch, car and I stitched to each other
This sand this water taste salt not of sweat but of sea
All day we sat parked and stitched with each other
Sweat and salt stinging the punctures where skin and hot vinyl fused with thread
Sun peaked and took time dipping as the water went out of our site
For miles it seemed we drove forward
as far we could to see where the water had gone
We found it two miles out from shore and sat with it
just touching our tires
Though the tide began swimming back in toward the shore
I did not move us
We sunk ourselves into the sand, fusing
The water rose on every side of us
It felt cool, soothed our stitches
Washed away the sticky sweat
Filled our engine then our lungs
