#Ball gag men serial#
#Ball gag men full#

When the American poet Frank O’Hara was pretty young, he made a translation of Mallarmé’s poem, “Un coup de dés.” It was something I liked to look at. After this, I was left to my own devices and at liberty to navigate over to some listings. “She’s translating Mallarmé,” the man I was married to said. It was something that got people to leave me alone. Anyway, it was something I could talk about in mixed company. Specifically, I was interested in Mallarmé, whom I considered glamorous as well as difficult. There were two main things I was doing during the time I was not working at the temp agency, or sleeping, or eating, or experiencing married sex, and these were: 1., translating French Symbolist poetry, and, 2., trawling Craigslist for employment. I’d listen to them discuss the unusual activities of the Angel Moroni and the irony of Abendsen’s The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, before we parted ways for the night, they to a fortress maintained by an eccentric dealer on Potrero Hill, I to my translations and, more importantly, Craigslist. He and the man I was married to went through a period of binges, and somehow I associated it with Scientology. He had about twenty tattoos and a gold front tooth and loved antique furniture and cocaine. He’d lived in a basement in Oakland for a few years before going to college, then grad school. We had a friend who’d grown up Mormon but renounced the faith at seventeen and ran away from home. He was paranoid yet flavorful, industrial strength. There was something vaguely gothic about Dick, I thought, something sharp and in bad taste. Dick in his open backpack, The Man in the High Castle and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Dick having allegedly inspired Hubbard to devise his intergalactic creed. He seemed not to want to get too close to them, but I noticed a week later two novels by Philip K. Ron Hubbard was like, I’m going to invent a truly stupid religion. I wanted to take the stress test, but he wouldn’t let me.

We’d take the bart to a party and pass card tables set up by proselytizing Scientologists, and he would explain that they believed all humans were animated by the souls of aliens long ago subject to genocide.

#Ball gag men full#

He was a relatively small man, and he was full of a searing rage, an odorless, colorless flame, unknowable to the naked eye. He was, as I was saying, not a large man. He returned with bags stuffed with violet tissue. We sat at our table by the window and had a beer.

#Ball gag men serial#

I thought of meningitis, serial killers, war. I loved him, the man I was married to and, as well as being afraid of earthquakes, feared that one of us might die in a plane crash or be pulled down by a rogue wave. It would come to me as I was walking down the street. I thought all the time about how much I loved him. He began telling a long, long story about his very young wife. He really was astonishing, ranching in his family, eyes and teeth like polished rocks. “I am so pleased!” announced the Australian, glinting hugely. Although I insisted that I preferred something with fewer hours, the agency maintained that it was low on contracts and could I please take them up on this offer, seeing as I was unlikely to receive another. Bush, had hired me, citing my unusual abilities as a typist. An Australian man with outrageous good looks, benefiting from the immigration policies of President George W. I had originally gone in to temp but had been hired as the front-desk girl. I worked fulltime for an employment agency. I lay, intact within the intact building, in bed, possessed by vertigo. During this process, I envisioned what I believed to be the exact fashion in which the building would collapse during an earthquake. It was a braying sound, accompanied by copious vibration. Around seven, the garage door screwed into the ceiling that was also the floor beneath our bed (a mattress) went into action. He was up at five, cycling into the East Bay.

Outside, in the mornings and at dusk, an oddly shaped vehicle I learned to call the Google Bus rolled darkly by. It was just two rooms with a kitchen, the bathroom memorable for its coordinating sink, tub, toilet, and floor-to-ceiling tile, all a click shy of Pepto-Bismol. We were living in San Francisco and through some act of god managed to find an apartment we could afford in an occasionally fancy neighborhood.

It was the sort of work he claimed to prefer. He wasn’t a tall man but I suppose he was reasonably strong. When we were first married, he went out and bought a ball gag.