Cigarette is her father. Camera is her
husband. Crystal is her son. Champagne is her lover.
Lights,
camera, action!
‘Look at me dancing in these diamonds, adik!’ My mother. My Linda. A serpent of
my soul, slithering in opulence and sweat. A goddess living in the kingdom of
deities and imps. Born into a home of baby-breeding actors and thrown into a
circus of trippy mannequins on the highway. There she goes, prancing in classic
black Chanel with a cancer stick glued between her alabaster fingers, those
broad hips swaying softly to the psychedelic poetry of Jim Morrison, clad in
her John and Yoko Ono’s Bed-In Peace thin shirt that denudes her bosom. The
swelling flesh is tingling and alive like stubborn mosquitoes on my salivated
tongue. Her flaming red nails match those inviting ruby lips down to the
deflowered genitalia that were once a warm home to me. She flutters her black
cartoon eyes like a flirtatious darling; teenage boys and sidewalks would
prostrate at her feet not long ago.
‘My baby, do you love me?’ she asks,
flicking the ciggy amidst her ashen-coloured teeth. A poignant image of her
green tudung attacks my brain cells
as I drink in the woman twirling before my unwelcome eyes, boundless and free
from a stranger’s hand in a desperate land. My mother. My Linda.
‘This
is the end. My only friend. The end.’
Morrison echoes in our ears. Jimi. Janis.
Jim. There goes another one. ‘Yes, Mama.’ I whisper. Audiences view her like a
picture book in an ancient library without alphabets and numbers, failing to
read the shades of blue beyond her nose ring and mouth piercing that glitter
like gold moles each time she drinks her Cola in the meth-fumed flask. ‘I live
for luxury. I live for love. I love you too, sayang.’ She wobbles unsteadily like an acrobatic girl training to
steady herself on ropes and giggles in my dumb face, chokes on her cigarette
and puts the half-burnt menthol lipstick into the ashtray while smoke licks us
all over. The woman in the green tudung
stares frighteningly through the Swarovski-studded frame on the foyer table,
black-mascaraed tears staining her plastic cheeks.
Money is her mother. Medicine is her
sister. Music is her daughter. Make-up is her best friend. One, two, three, go!
‘You are ashamed of me, sayang. I know you are.’ Her sadistic
aura and slurred speech stings like a honeyed venom through my psyche. The
little girl in me gouges her eyes out, eats them for dinner and spews out my
own face. She is blind to the night call of a phantom singer who pays a visit
to Linda as he cuts the strings off from her body like a broken wooden puppet
doll. Her domestic world is shut; she is flying home towards a suicidal music
festival with her past paramour. 1969 Woodstock is waiting and celebrating her
arrival in a hippie camper van of vivid colours. Wrinkled baby-arms probe
impatiently inside their former mothers’ nests to shoot fast bullet of swimming
tadpoles; to seek security, warmth and pleasure. This is a beautiful image of
gods copulating with monsters in the garden of poets and politicians. The
master, the brother, The Lizard King chants to his serpent sister in a
welcoming foreplay.
‘The
blue bus is callin’ us. The blue bus is callin’ us.’
‘I am lighted again! Dance with me, adik.’ Strange scene pirouette in my
mind seductively as I watch her body ignite with an old flame, like a race car
competition, until she reaches the border of her homeland, driving fast and
wild to win the famous grand trophy of blood, tears and gold. The green tudung has burnt away; its ashes are
scattered among her dandruff-hair and blowing stubbornly in the stenchful wind
of liquor and love. Naked slaves of physical harmonies and emotions grind
against one another on the grass of grey-fluid earth. Linda arrives home. A
wild serpent hunting for rats and sex. She hisses; ‘Where are you?’
‘Kill,
kill, kill, kill, kill.’
Morrison provokes behind her, his long
pink tongue poking and invading my home. The beautiful union of brother and
sister. ‘Here. Always.’ I mumble. She smiles sweetly at me, her sharp intake of
breath a greeting gesture as she tastes of glitter and guitar with rock ‘n’
roll in her womb. An alien sensation stirs in the cloudy room of smoke, sweat
and stained sofas. ‘Come here and kiss your mother.’ She discards her shorts
and tosses them on the bed she shares with her man and men of bad fruits. The
emerald ring radiates like a fiery beacon against her scale-like fingers, a
token of my poor father’s love for his rebellious young wife. My mother. Our
Linda. Thirty years sentenced to his jailhouse motel madness by the signed
contract of drag aunties and chain necklaces have delivered the final blows to
her head, breast and feet.
‘Ride
the snake, ride the snake, ride the snake.
Father,
I want to kill you.
Mother,
I want to fuck you.’
There’s a killer in the house and a
family will die before dawn. I gaze at the long serpent of seven miles, touch
her cold fragile skin and offer my white orchid to Linda to end her nights of
secret sports and tender perjuries and for her coming home from caged
debaucheries. Taking her hand, I ride the reptile through the summer rain in
the blazing desert under the apricot spotlight. She smothers my lips until we
puke cherry wine of rust and salt, flowing like a river from her eggs to my
engines; sucking on her sugar-flavoured lollipop still. Our purities are
extinct; we are two incognitos in the heated dry sandstorm. We descend rapidly
like two trapped cannonballs that are hungry to be released for the destruction
of an innocent town. Once the fireworks kiss the citizens and embrace their
children, explosions of bright confetti will be a triumphant celebration among
carnies and cannibals of our blood. Her new people will dance on future
generations around a bonfire where they burn fresh condoms, torn clothes and
pious peers. A new song of musical moans and orgy orchestras will become the
national anthem as two serpents, two Lindis,
brother and sister, recoil incestuously on sigils all around the country as
they praise joyously for the return of their king and queen.
