The Harder They Come

 

Ecstasy and shadows. This one is a slight tangent to what's included in Studio and Painter— the first night, in late 2001, Mary H. spent with me at 154 North 21st Street. Were we monsters of selfishness and vanity to be doing what we were doing? People who follow our story, know— someone innocent was being trampled underfoot. Melissa and Mary already intensely disliked each other. In retrospect, you don't tell a twenty-five year old kid, as I was then, who happens to be bursting at the seams with life-force energy, and channeling all the explosiveness of Center City Philly in the Aughts, to stay faithful when his true cosmic mate arrives. Mary H and I were meant for each other. That night at 154, we drank rum and water (grog, I believe it's called) from large mugs, smoked a few spliffs, and grooved to this, the Jimmy Cliff-dominated Harder They Come soundtrack. We were still only edging towards physical involvement; but the ice was beginning to melt. Euphoria, giddiness, a sense of attunement to higher realities— it was all there. As I marveled, as all Mary's more profound involvements did, at the wide gap between her restrained public persona and the born-to-be-wild riot grrl she was in private. It is still a source of disappointment to me, that I handled my personal life sloppily at the time; but, as the song goes, I had found my true will, and was myself attuned to the higher reality of how pieces in the universe belong. And our together insignia, which began then, was always the philosophy that a little Dionysian insanity, drunkenness and highness (highness emphasized for Mary H), never hurts, if you want to feel, in your body and soul, what it means to be fully alive.