Hear my prayer, O Lord, though all I do all day is watch
old black-and-white movies on TV. Speak to me
through William Powell or Myrna Loy, solve the mystery
of my sloth. Show me the way to take a walk or catch
a cold, anything but read another exposé
of the Kennedys. Teach me to sing or at least play
the piano. For ten years I took lessons, and all
I learned was to hate Bach. Shake me up or down. Call
me names. Break my ears with AC/DC—I deserve far
worse. Rebuke me in front of my ersatz friends. Who cares?
They don't like me much anyway. Make me fat in lieu
of thin. Give me a break or don't. I'm a hundred million
molecules in search of an author. If that's you, thank you
for my skin. Without it I'd be in worse shape than I'm in.
I beseech thee, O Yellow Pages, help me find a number
for Barbara Stanwyck, because I need a tough broad
in my corner right now. She'll pour me a tumbler
of scotch or gin and tell me to buck up, show me the rod
she has hidden in her lingerie drawer. She has a temper,
yeah, but her laugh could take the wax off a cherry red
Chevy. “Shoot him,” she'll say merrily, then scamper
off to screw an insurance company out of another wad
of dough. I'll be left holding the phone or worse, patsy
in another scheme, arrested by Edward G. Robinson
and sent to Sing Sing, while Barb lives like Gatsby
in Thailand or Tahiti, gambling the night away until the sun
rises in the east, because there are some things a girl can be sure
of, like morning coming after night's inconsolable lure.
Some days I feel like Janet Leigh in Touch of Evil—
I wake up, sunny and blond, but by the time midnight
rolls around I've been hijacked by Akim Tamiroff's
greasy thugs, shot up with heroin, framed for murder,
and I'm out cold in a border town jail. I didn't kill
Akim, of course, it was Hank Quinlan—drunk, overweight
Orson Welles—who for thirty-odd years as sheriff
has been framing creeps for crimes they maybe did. Enter
Mike Vargas, tall handsome Mexican cop—Charlton
Heston with a weird little mustache and a dark tan
from a can. “You don't talk like a Mexican,” Welles
says, which speaks to me, because I can see how talking
like a Mexican could solve any number of roadside hells
I am currently running away from—well, walking.
The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. I am
that Trinculo, wandering this blue-green island, drunk
in the company of clowns, waiting for a telegram
that will boost me out of my present jam. Oh, yes ma'am,
I'm in quicksand and thinking about The Mummy sunk
under a 4,000-year curse, or is it Caliban
skulking in the underbrush of my mind? What's this funk
that's grabbed me like a gorilla in love? If I can
shake-and-bake it into the next century, slam dunk
it into a FedEx box, send it to Kalamazoo,
then maybe I'll be able to breathe, but that low-down skunk,
my heart, won't quit beating for Prospero and his stew
of thunder and magic, so I stay up nights and scour
the sky for Zeus, his bolts shaking the midnight hour.