from BLOOD HEAT

It’s a hot, nasty Chicago afternoon. I watch Mom enter the yard through the alley. Crab apples are rotting. Worms are ecstatic. She’s dialoguing with a breeze and she’s clearly pissed at the sun. She’s drunk.

“Oh, honey.” She’s come from a smoky, black-windowed kafana where she learned the barmaid’s son was born with his bladder outside his body, and rushed to America on an emergency visa, where the doctors fixed his bladder but left him with a stub of a penis.

“The kid is fourteen, and he has a girlfriend. All he wants is a penis, God bless him! We’re gonna raise the money. Whaddayou say? We’ll put on a grand gala.”

Ku Klux Klan meets State Trooper

wow

PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS AN ELEVEN YEAR OLD

Hot damn. In fifth grade and already channeling the spirit of Oscar Wilde. The boots were Payless. Jeans: from her mecca, GapKids. Cirque du Soleil was her obsession, and she danced daily to the soundtrack, a shamanic - and very 80s - electrodance odyssey.

Recently the artist did a frenzied West African - style tribute to one of the more percussive numbers of "Nouvelle Experience" in her kitchen, with a baby blanket on her head. The audience was stupefied.

from INTO THE FOG

He proposed under the covers, with a euphoric grin on his face. The engagement lasted two weeks. We had no time to waste. I wore an electric blue minidress to the ceremony, and when we walked out of town hall, gypsies with babies on their hips flung their palms at us, whining, “please! a little something for luck on your big day!” Our honeymoon was spent driving up the coast, sleeping in a tent or borrowing the bedrooms of his teenage cousins, making love amidst plastic fashion dolls and plush monkeys.