THE RED HOT CHILI PEPPER NECKLACE

Enter thy sanctuary and you are at life’s trap door.

The car came to a halt, a trailer home enlarged itself before us and we entered. My friend Brian had brought me here, something about Bill the fellow we came to visit, he knew how to make the best Carnitas in the world, everyone was instantly enamoured with him as a person and as a fine chef, so I had come for the privilege treat of consuming, in good company, a delectable dish.

Bill, a tall blond fellow, handsome blue-jean build, white starched shirt, was immediately courteous to our arrival, greeting me with warmth and a surprising immediate hug. Rather admiringly I spoke the first words, “That is a lovely red chili pepper necklace you are wearing.” It was lovely, a long gold strand and hanging from it was this most succulent red hot chili pepper with its green base, just glistening hotness. Bill appreciated the compliment, “Oh yes, had it made when I was in Baja, I was browsing the typical tourist jewelry shop where all merchandise is cheap and fine, but Jose, the owner, a tall husky Mexican with glasses told me that I should instead have a necklace tailored for my character.” Reflexively quixotic I reverberated Bill’s words, “…for your character…” He proceeded to explain, “Yes, Jose told me yeah you can buy jewelry of any kind easily enough but jewelry that matches your character can only be crafted by a jeweler that explores and feels your emotional character; and Jose claimed to be such a jeweler, and if I consented for seventeen dollars, he would take the honor of searching my aura and craft its style into a necklace. At the time I thought it all expensive but different, besides I was in one of those tourist modes in which it is easy to part with money for no satisfaction, and so I agreed. Jose sat me down on a tiny stool that was very uncomfortable, I had to move back and forth to retain my balance, but I was told that while I would be trying to keep my balance it would jostle my aura enough so that he would be able to see what wasn’t my aura from the wave like distortions in my shadowing surroundings. The sun was blaring outside, the heat worked relentlessly, I was perspiring like a fountain, still I kept my obtuse seating position. Jose would look at my eyebrow, move it with his worn fingers, he would touch my palm and firmly run his fingers the length of my arm, pause to feel and then tactile his way through me with his eyes, then he would again pause, and raise his eyes as if he were looking straight into his brow, I again was not in any communal spirit here, I was just buying some jewelry, but it didn’t seem strange what he was doing, I just sort of felt that it was what he needed to do. After about twenty minutes without any conversation, Jose got up and told me to come back in a week and my necklace would be ready, and he used a tone which would discouraged curious probing. I told him I was leaving for America in two days and it would be impossible to return; he seemed unmoved by my dilemma, he took out a cigarette but did not light it, strolled towards the exit door, and repeated yet again that it would take a week. I asked if I could pay in advance and have it shipped; Jose kept staring away at the hot day and said he didn’t mail personal aura jewelry, “too much risk, too much risk, not good, not good if it gets lost” somewhat raising his hands as if questioning my sanity, “You want part of your essence in someone else’s hands?” I don’t know why I did it, it did not even occur to me to ask what the price of my aura necklace would be; I just walked out, not answering of my return.

One week later I was at Jose’s hut again, he took out the necklace and it was just so beautiful, a long golden chain magnifying a very red chili pepper, and it appeared to grow more color while held in my palms, to which Jose replied, “Its your energy that makes it glow more, you radiate with it, more because it is you, there is no resistance between you and the necklace.” Jose let me enjoy my necklace very much, I looked at my mirror image on a dusty scarred mirror, and it was growing joy within me. Jose could tell that I was pleased and, pointing his finger at my mirror image, he said “I see your smiling well.” And not once did he inhibit my luxuriating on the moment, when I finally got more used to it, I asked him how much, he said it would be “$99 dollars.” Ninetynine dollars. I am not even sure if the thing was real gold, or what the red chili pepper was made of, but it was obviously worth more than that to me, I paid him kindly offering him an additional twenty dollars but he refused it, he said, “they are all one ninetynine dollars and you don’t need to over pay.”

“Wow that is quite the tourist shopping story if nothing else.” but Bill ignored my insensitive comment and continued to greet a few others that had arrived. Bill lived in a trailer home, a strange contraption, a skipping stone for the lower classes on their way to a house, a place for senior citizens to hide if they start outliving their pensions, I have just never appreciated these hideous prefabs of fakeness, which I hold, like all other decent human beings, solely responsible for the creation of tornadoes. We were drinking tequila shots and margaritas, margaritas on the rocks never crushed, on the rocks I love Margaritas, with lots of salt around the rim of the glass, refreshing addiction to contradiction. We moved into Bill’s very small and uncomfortable kitchen. He would talk to us as he was cooking. He just flowed with the prepping and cooking process, mincing garlic, not an easy thing yet he flew through that task, chopped cilantro into refined grains of sand, I was in envy, and he smartly diced the onions neatly, without so much as blistering a tear, smiling his young looking handsome face of thirty-six years, green eyes calmly darting through the whole adventure. And I must say that the hanging chili pepper necklace sure fit nicely into his distilled spirit.

The irresistible time for cooking the carnitas arrived, as you are fully aware of my sanguinary love of food I was ready to take notes. Throughout my history I had sautéd, boiled, fried, broiled and baked carnitas hundreds of times, adding condiments of every variety, and my phenomenal inconsistency only yielded esoteric satisfaction. Feeding disappointments to my beloved Domaine, a true connoisseur of carnitas, every time that I failed her audience brought me dim joy; but she loved me too much to utter discontent, neither did her honesty allow her to applaud and fake a cheer. It came to be that the task of cooking carnitas became very painful to perform, I suffered anxiety attacks, I started to fry my brain trying to calculate all the possible things that I was doing wrong, I went on carnitas eating binges where I would hunt and visit restaurants that would make them, and eat them slowly trying to backwards reengineer the cooking process, and it was not a few times that I was told, by the cocineros de carnitas, that the recipe was a trade secret.

Bill moved some pans around, and I started to make my way closer to him so as to observe, securing a place by his side by offering to help, and he was most willing to teach; but then lively, happy, overly confident, jokester Brian enters the picture and commences to clamor for my attention, I was somewhat trying to avoid him, but then Mr. Attention Spam lover goes on to imply that he might as well have come to the party by himself. I liked Brian he was charming, a conglomeration of laughter, joy and life drama, he was a gay porn star that had much to tell about the business of making movies. I appreciated such life affirming information as “did you know that you can not film violence and sex at the same time, if the violence starts the sex has to cease, and vice versa; a gun for instance can not be used in a threatening manner during the sexually spasmodic encounter…” that sort of quotable stuff sounded to me as if we had never grown out of watching cartoons. I mean the correlation to cartoons is here immense, in cartoons you are not allowed to kill your characters, they are not allowed to have sex either, both porn and cartoons are based on fantasy, you watch both cartoons and porn knowing that you will never do what they do, but you wish that you could do it, but you know people would laugh and ridicule you if you tried it; more you sense that any attempt at mimicking this apparently superficial actions might fatally injure your moral fiber. Still the separation of sex and violence seems odd, after all sex is necessarily a violent act. Sex is mutually consented rape.

We were all sort of laughing at the hysterical irony implied by all this, when Bill yelled out for all to hear the “carnitas are ready!” A roaring approval came back from the gang but not from me. I went into a deep silence, inward refraction, my soul spiraling all into my toes, despondently I uttered this words to Bill, “How did you cook them?.” He quickly replied “Oh I just boiled them, there is nothing else to do, the pig provides all of the flavoring.” I repeated the words to myself, barely moving my lips, “the pig provides all of the flavoring.” Brian had as usual gotten all of my attention and I had missed it all. I had told Domaine that I would be coming back home with an award winning carnitas recipe; how could I, not being French, complicate or make sound special, “Oh I just boiled them…” Well if it was just so, I had picked all the wrong pigs at the wrong butcher shop, maybe I was being sold some other kind of meat by my butcher, maybe he was feeding me left over lamb or some part of shark meat that tasted like pork but wasn’t pig! That could be it, my butcher was suffering financial woes, he had spent all his retirement money on a butcher shop but people were just “not buying meat,” or so he complained to me. Only now I knew what he meant by “no one was buying meat!”

We voraciously consumed the carnitas bamboozling our bodies not to over react to the Tequila, but more because they were so delicious, every bite my tongue tasted the fatty pig essence rippling into me, into my sangre flesh, blessed all in a holy pool of avocado, tomato, cilantro, and chili pepper pecadillo. The night gathered in plenty of ridicule and obscenity rituals where some times I felt we were crossing social barriers only to find that we would retreat in laughter as soon as it came to breaking out of our middle class hives. As the night drew to a close and only five of us remained, presumably Bill’s dearest of friends, some smart ass proposed that we toast to our gracious host; where all immediately clamored to the idea, sparkling Tequila shots raised high to celebrate the fine man, and smart ass shouted, “for our revered Bill that makes young men meet their dia de los muertos!” Brindis! Shot glasses crashing into each other. I shot my tequila straight into my gutter, performing the complimentary accompanying faces of disgust; turning then to ask of Brian, “What does he mean by saying that Bill makes young men meet their dia de los muertos?” Brian seemed uncomfortable having to respond to my question, he ignored it and asked instead, “I am ready to go home let us say our goodnights.” “Wait Brian you are not answering my question.” Brian got ire eyes and said you shouldn’t want to inquire about this and I shouldn’t be the one to answer here but I’ve got too much alcohol in my veins for protocol; Bill is an assassin with a serial record of killings, and he only murders young men.” My body playing back eons of stalagmite frozen in silent caverns; Brian fashioned a brusque bodily gesture implying that I might not have the ability to understand what was going on here, or why it was not a bad thing, without waiting to comfort my incomprehensibility he shouted, “I am getting out of here, find your own way home.” I sat on an old raggedy granny chair near a fake fire place that was fired up by furnished gas; fake translucent logs hiding the counterfeited flame, I sat there, beer evaporating in my sweating palm, gazing at the fire and searching to feel what all this meant, why I had felt such an attraction to this man, why was I in his trailer home, enjoying such a now perplexing evening; and what did it mean to me that he was a murderer, and stranger yet that his closest friends new his profession and yet seemed so comfortable with him. It was his job, it was what he did, we all had jobs we didn’t like. There, while under such hypnotic trance, Bill came near and noted, “Well, I guess we are all alone now.”

I instantly raised to my feet, I moved into the kitchen area, a trailer home is really one large room with partitions which never really separate any point of space from another point in space, it was the kitchen that had the closest exit. I stood by the stove, and Bill went around me to lean back into the white wall next to the door. He was calm, rested, content with the evening; it had been a dear gathering of friends; and more Bill seemed pleased that I had come. He gave me his boyish young smile saying, “You look a bit stiff?” Needing not to hear such comment, I glanced at him, constricting my hands in my pockets, sort of not wanting to look straight into his eyes, and desiring to avoid conversation of any kind, “Your carnitas were delicious, and all you do is boil them?” Well yes I just boil them, but it is not the boiling process that gives them the flavor, it is more how much you are there with them when you are cooking. The more you are Near with your carnitas the better they will taste, they respond well to attention, everything responds well to attention.” “But I have given my carnitas lots of attention and yet they never really turn out like yours.” “No, you are not from here really are you? You sort of are here but you really can’t give your attentions to things Near for too long because something from afar keeps on tugging at you; almost making it impossible for you to be near, here.” I don’t know why what he said made instant sense to me, I did not need him to explain it much, it was clear to me that I had always sort of not been all here, in the near, and that it required a lot of concentration to remain here; while I had always wanted to be earthbound with common truths and absolutism I had always felt a greater tug by a metaphysical sense of being.

It also became clear to me that he knew me and that he loved me and that he had expected us to meet at some point in this existence. And today the marriage feast carnitas had turned out specially well. Feeling the self to its inner most glares its essence upon the world, where it beckons tangling connections weaving into the dangling stream of likes, it was our sameness that made our conversation superfluous to the underlying rivers of suppositions, interminably exchanging and tangling us into Gordian knots. Two lovers talking their millennium long honeymoon in their trailer home. Seemingly opposites a perfect match, I had trouble killing a fly; and spiders operated a reign of terror in my apartment; he was a murderer of innocence. I was convinced that he was somehow aware that I knew he was a murderer. Without waiting for my uneasy disposition to secure the question, he promoted himself to comfort me by answering the unquestioned.

“I murder men because I have desired to be near your essence, it is through the killing of others that I draw their innocent energies into me thus avoiding the contamination of maturity; and thus becoming more a Near, a being that refreshes primarily the present. It is difficult to gather life energy when we are Fars, killers are the most dead, we barely can get enough of ourselves into existence, we kill to stay alive, we kill to repeat to ourselves our existence; true beggars needing constant Near nourishment from what is most supremely alive because we are the most dead. Somehow I was aware that by being more here I would find your essence, and that you would find my constructed near self, all I had to do was just to keep on murdering, enlarging myself in the present.” A grande lump in my throat the size of a chiquita banana, “So you have gone around being a serial killer so you could draw me to you?” A silent responding essence, petrified innocence leaning into the kitchen wall next to a white door, a window on it allowed me to see the banishing sun, a distant melting “…yes” His body sinking and permeating into white wall, his blue-jeans bleaching into the white, his white starched shirt so much now this wall that all I could see was the red chili pepper necklace; while his young boyish immaculate essence all quicksand into a white wall, lingering a drowning “…yes”, I stood tall and derisive, “how could you think that?” whispering howls, “You are a bad carnitas cook because you are not all here, your always readjusting to remain here. The act of “thinking” is tampering with your Far. Your essence is a pure Far ever refreshing infinite generalities, always you will be just an image here. You have now been drawn to me because hitherto I was formidably here, near everything that is earth, solid, pure material essence, each boy I killed made me more here, each murder drew me more solid, each essence from each body that escaped into me narrowed the essence of my being into rock formations; a certainty that I was nowhere else. I felt that you, though I could not tell how you would be, one merely searches for an ambiguous essence, one does not guess appearance or character, an essence equals anything, but I felt that you were out there. You being from afar where inconsistency abounds would find it alluring to feel and inspect certainty, and the more near focused I, the more you would be drawn to me, yet I a Far myself, in love with your Far, have made myself near to be loved by your denial of self.”

I felt my irritated flesh a protruding topsy-turvy cotton sweater, uncomfortably I moved inside of myself; tears began to dance out of his grass eyes, echoing “…I made myself a Near because you would not acknowledge Far…” I closed my eyes and searched within myself, my stethoscopic ears hearing his heart crying palpitations of devotion towards me, melting me, adding smoothness and comforts to the distance I felt between the world and myself, emotional paths ripening spiraling crumble zones, dispersing the irrational weight of our emotions. Awareness awakens, he was my twin, a twin that had murdered his sameness to mine because I had denied it and he most wanted to remain with me. I was in love with an opposite essence, a negation of myself. Red Hot Chili Pepper was really not all the lust and zest and vibrancy of a Near, druid to his loving heart he reached out for my love and ended up solidifying into rational earth consequences, he diced too many tomatoes, he destroyed to much in his path towards me; yet never reached near enough to cry while stabbing onions; we were both strangers here, but at least I was still my unresolved self, while he had had to zigzag around inconsistencies so as to avoid contingencies, I still had every doubt and faith in uncertainty, I could go anywhere from irrational. While where ever he could move he had to logic the certain knowledge of his deeds and their consequences. I walked towards his sinking essence, crying himself abysmally into the deeper wall, slowly I carved a pilgrimage approaching his praying wall and gave it a bleeding kiss.

Regaining my bearing on the near, it was now four and seven minutes in the morning, I picked up the abandoned Red Hot Chili Pepper necklace and went home to my beloved Domaine, who was not uncommonly upset at my lateness home; after accepting the necessary chastising I kissed her and placed the red hot chili pepper necklace around her long slender neck, that very day, I cooked her the best carnitas she had ever tasted; she even cheered and applauded, and gave me a big fat wet kiss, while pushing me on top of the dining table, not many carnitas left, demanding with her luscious sensations that I tell her where I got the recipe, her depravation our raw joy.