Tarantula Rose

A girlfriend I once had used to get mad at me for staring at her but she loved that I thought she was so beautiful and she knew that I loved her for who she really was. We’re still friends but we lost track of each other when she was in hiding and I went back to rehab. I think she ended up in jail for a while again not long after that. You lose track of people sometimes. Sometimes they come back at you from the other side of the weave of everything, they reappear from the unacknowledged shadow of the was, as phantoms from another world, to haunt. Or maybe they disappear forever. Maybe they die. Or you do. Life is mysterious you know. That accounts for the some of the unbearable beauty of it all.

We were poor and crazy and strung out on drugs and ahhh but aren’t those things so conventionally pitiable and or contemptiblle, but here’s the thing.

We had this one good true thing and it was so good because it was so true. Such things don’t always last, they flower and fade and if you’re lucky they come back at you from the other side of the weave. Maybe they never come back. The mystery of it accounts for the beauty. And Saguara and I had if only on and off and sometimes quite briefly, something mysteriously beautiful that would stay with us each individually after we’d lost track of each other.

We had the magic that we felt when we were together and we were inseparable for short sweet stretches during which time we probably seemed to outsiders like lost souls suffering addiction and mental illness and dire poverty but dear reader would you believe me if I told you that the way that we remember it is that we somehow found the glory of love through each other after both having spent far too long wandering desolate loveless wastes gnashing our teeth in the outer dark of the most liminal interstices at the outermost fringes of the fraying margins of America imaginable. We two together found something sacred the memory of which we both still carry with us so that in less romantic situations like rehab or jail or withdrawal we have this common candle we’ve kindled in our souls to help us make it through the dark and lonely times and perchance to someday come together again to build a fire for light and warmth to live by.

I was a perpetually broke but reasonably handsome and occasionally poetic fifty year old guero gringo drifter. I can be soulful and charming but I don’t really do much. Bit of a junky to be quite honest with you! Ah but what can you do, I would end up in rehab again soon. My probation officer wouldn’t have it any other way.

Saguara was a little over thirty, still youthfully brash and very good-looking with well-formed features: high cheekbones, a wide smile, the nose well-balanced with the chin, menacingly intelligent eyes. Immaculately complected smooth dark mahogany skin and straight black hair. She was indigenous, from the Tohono O’odham Nation. She didn’t fit in with her family. She was transgender. That is how that kind of thing works sometimes. (You meet people like her wandering the desolate wastes at the outermost fringes of fraying America you know.) She’d been doing hormone replacement for a while now. I didn’t fit in with my family either. We both had dark stories about that kind of thing. Traumatic histories etc. We didn’t fit in in a lot of other places either. But for a little while we fit in with each other and that was very precious and meaningful and would leave lasting impressions on us both.

We dated and lived with one another a few times over the years. We enjoyed conversing and conversed with each other in a way that we never got to converse with anyone else in our lives owing to the unique and beautiful strangeness of our relationship. She was both booksmart and streetsmart. She could play instruments well. She was witty (though she could be unexpectedly verbally hurtful sometimes) and brought out the intelligence in others. Sometimes she was quite scientific and analytical with a keen sense of logic and common sense but she could at the same time also be deeply mystical, spiritual and religious in ways that she enjoyed not explaining. Very intense really. She would have episodes where she became very paranoid and quick to anger but she mostly loved joking around, laughing loudly and having fun. On drugs. Hanging out, getting high, watching tv, cuddling, conversing.

I first met her at The Bad Vibe Motel. Back then it had been the Motel 6, then for a while it was the Ocotillo… now it was shut down and condemned after a big bust for welfare fraud against indigenous tribes in eight different states or something. The Bad Vibe Motel was by The Minsk and The Last Cactus at Park and Benson on the south side right on the other side of i10  from the Tucson Marketplace. She’d come into my room after having stolen some cocaine and a gun from some US Army guys who wanted to gang rape her (as recounted in the spring 2020 stories.) She’d thrown the gun in the pool!

When I’d first met her her name was Veracity, but she’d since made a point of telling me that she was no longer Veracity. The name Veracity had lost its veracity. She’d explained to me that Veracity had died and left the body that she, Saguara, now inhabited. The name change had been metaphysical. Not merely nominative but noumenal. It was a change in her very being, a transubstantiation, during which she’d experienced a time outside of time, subsumed into a temporal dimension beyond the durational, into the eternal, the dream time, the womb and tomb…

“…and the arrangement of the cosmos being what it is,” she explained intensely, “You end up at another set of axes and gyroscopes in the phantasmiferous ether of it all like psyche the butterfly…”

and she (Saguara) explained to me that her body had changed completely. It seemed like the same one to me but no, she’d actually phased into a very different body on a vibrational level and that body was wholly Saguara. We lay in bed in the shadows of the cool room and talked for a little bit but I had to get washed off after traveling.

We did various drugs and we conversed upon mathematics. It turned out we were both really into orders of infinity which was pretty cosmic in my opinion. We talked about transfinite numbers in bed and then we got to talking about about prime numbers in the shower as I soaped her down and washed her hair. After that we got high and she nodded off and I got a white claw from the fridge and came back and lazed languidly whispering sweet nothings. I knew she she was asleep but I spoke to her that way anyway as the sun rose up out of the end of the night. It was Christmas Eve or maybe it was Christmas. She woke up briefly and softly cooed my name. So here we were in the warp shuttle of the everweaving moment just kind of experiencing the dawn and not thinking about Christmas but experiencing Christmas, the very spirit of the thing for real in one of the city’s many sleazy little barrios, garish neon sign dawn. We conversed.

“I’ve been really into transfinity lately.”

“Transfinity,” she said, a look of sleep-heavy wonder in her eyes. She was naked and kind of absentmindedly fondling her penis so I kissed her neck. 

“Like you said before.” We’d conversed upon it previously.

“It’s a nice word,” she said.

“I didn’t expect you to be into numbers,” I said.

Our faces were very close and it was all very warm though the topic of our talk was so abstract as to seem cold. I put my hand on her hand and moved my hand along with hers on her cock.

“I have a computer science degree,” she said. “You’re just racist and sexist.”

“I guess. But let me ask you something about some other stuff. Can I get weird?”

“Go ahead whiteboy,” she smiled wide and her eyes lit up.

“There could be like an physical structure of numbers and that structure could be like a stairway where each step is composed of the difference between the primes and the naturals but the structure providing for this structural element within numbers…” I began, getting very into what I was saying before forgetting where I was going with it as I trailed off and she blew a cloud of drug vapor out in front of me.

“Would be non numeric,” she said, finishing my thought, for such was our intimacy. I started staring at her again but she brandished the back of her hand so I stopped.

“Did you ever work as a programmer or whatever?” I asked her.

“Yeah but I got fired for doing drugs. Then like I wouldn’t go back to the rez because my family and other stuff. I wanted to go be a girl in the world. And I like numbers. Not as much as I like sex drugs Minecraft and anime but more than I like food or sunlight.” I laughed. (I had actually learned to play Minecraft from Saguara.)

She stared off into space, her eyes abstract and intense, very dark. I had my face very near her and once again began staring at her profile. She was always working her jaw, clenching her teeth, moving her tongue in her mouth. She’d told me many times she had a strong inner voice. Her beauty was evident in countless small details in her face. Human faces have that quality like sunsets and flowers and seashells and great art where you can become utterly spellbound looking at them and look more and more closely and get more and more lost in the natural beauty of it. I’ve had times I was alone and learned to forget that such experiences existed. Sometimes we forget the most beautiful things as a way to protect ourselves from the pain of their inevitable absences. More commonly acknowledged is that we some of the worst and most painful as a way to protect ourselves from the pain of their presence. Saguara and I both had stories where there were parts we could not remember or parts where we could not go into detail because of flashbacks or intense feelings or panic attacks. Memory has levels and layers. Things disappear but they don’t stay forgotten and it takes work to keep the knowledge repressed beneath the threbshold of conscious waking experience so we pretend (quite convincingly to “ourselves”) to forget the very best and worst things in life! But when they return we are reminded of what beauty or ugliness really are out there (and indeed too within ourselves) and how the forms and meanings of their existences transform the forms and meanings of our own.

I, a shiftless, occasionally poetic bum, was utterly transported by the act of gazing lovingly upon the beauty of her face and pondering the depths of her soul as one does at a time like this. The aleph of all space and the rose at the still point of the turning world in the faintly flickering twitch of her eyecorner and mouth’s edge. Little twinkles of twilight energy in the dawn air of the Tarantula Rose Motel where the fresh cool morning air came into the room to mingle with the thicker stranger darker air of the room which smelled of hard drugs and deviant sex. Outside all of reality was happening in some completely different language.

Saguara’s face! The way the movements of the eyes nose and mouth were all interconnected through a warm infinitely subtle weave of sacred incarnate flesh. These subtle movements meant very little in most common social contexts but they became everything in the context of an admiring new lover enraptured by the very littlest details of a lover who like a flower or a sunset simply captivates us through our body and takes a hold of our mind and soul and makes us remember the kinds of things we all too often forget.

Sometimes she seemed angry and almost scary way like she might suddenly hurt you but that quality made winning her favor all the more sweet. She was so smart and so fucked up, you meet people like that sometimes, especially if you, like myself, are also like that.

“Complex numbers have the power of the imaginary,” she drawled dreamily, still waking up.

“Yeah and they have that power to the power of the imaginary,” I said. “Or, conversely or whatever, imaginary numbers are not qualitatively different from all the other numbers, but they are like, they add one more dimension that allows for a new order of infinity.”

“Aren’t all numbers imaginary really?”

“Are they mere symbols or is there something of the eucharist in them. Of transubstantiation?”

“Of transfinity?”

“Right that too! Both of that shit.” I waved my hand in a broad general indefinite gesture.

“Have more of those White Claws,” she said. “They’re taking up fridge space.”

“Okay. It feels weird though. White Claw is kind of too gay for me.”

“You sure baby?” She asked, smirking.

“I feel ashamed,” I said dramatically, “as a survivor who got called a ittle fag—”

“Oh come on Papi,” She laughed. “Too gay? You were just helping me absentmindedly stroke my sensitive but flaccid penis as I obsessively looked over how much drug shit I have left.”

“First of all,” I said, “the penis is female so it isn’t gay, and also it wasn’t fully flaccid it was getting hard.”

“You had some electricity flowing with the number talk. I think that I as a transgender woman am fully woman, yes, but like also, if you touch my dick, it’s gay.”

“Even better,” I said. “Chicks love gay guys.” I laughed proudly at my terrible joke, which she easily ignored.

“Do you really think numbers are like the eucharist?” She asked me sincerely. These were the kind of moments that we had that we never had with anybody else.

“Yeah I do!” I said loudly, riled up. “Because there may be something not numerical –it might not be physical, it might be metaphysical, or even pataphysical—that gives a kind of hard reality to the prime numbers as well as continuity to the number line and the analytical planes such that we see evidence of a transnumeric fabric exist beyond or beneath or even exuding from within where it is somehow immanent, the continuum.”

“The transnumeric continuum!” she said, putting a pinch of drugs onto some foil.

“Are you gonna space out now?”

“Yes baby do you mind? You can hang out here as much as you want but I might have to work at some point. Also can you move your face away from mine more please it’s weird.”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was transfixed by your beauty and it’s relation to the ideal beauty that seems to radiate from even the leastest beauties in the smallest things.”

“I know I know. Maybe there’s a non numeric prime number constant—”

“A non numeric prime number constant!??”

“Yeah one constant to rule them all and in the darkness bind them,” she said.

“Could it be?” I wondered allowed, a kind of childlike awe in my voice. “Could it be gravity?” I seemed to be on the verge of a huge epiphany about math and physics but then I lost my train of thought and gave up with a sanguine sigh of dope sage resignation. I was high enough and we were in love enough that it seemed like there was more than enough time for everything in the universe.

So she hit the drugs and spaced out for a bit and she drifted in and out of consciousness and listened when she realized I was talking and I went on about how the transnumeric could involve an order of infinity greater than the numeric and provide the matrix or numeriferous ether in which the numbers can infinitely propagate and that this order need not be physical but might be some greater order within which the physical and the numeric exist in parallel as it were, with neither containing nor contained by the other, but both contained within some greater order of the transphysical which is connected to the metaphysical through the pataphysical. It just seemed like common sense to me. She nodded and smiled even when she couldn’t tell what the hell I was talking about.

Soon I started drifting off myself but suddenly she started talking about prime numbers again. She was not even properly awake but she was telling me, her eyes closed but her tone urgent: “The profound irregularity and diversity of the primes is what allows the natural numbers to extend along a kind of crystalline lattice into actual infinity because otherwise sufficiently large numbers would become factorable!”

“Exactly,” I said. “It just seems like common sense!”

She opened her eyes and stretched and got out some drugs from the drawer in the table by the side of the bed. Her hair was lumpy with sleep and her aura was one of childlike innocence. We all still have that glow in us, that miraculous innocence and naivite. Even the damaged goods and suchlike among us.

She stretched and made adorable feline noises as she clenched her eyes tight and opened her mouth wide. She reached up into the air and arched her back and I leaned into her and kissed the sensitive skin beneath her armpit and blew a puff of air out of my nose in a deliberate attempt to tickle her and she told me to stop tickling her and I denied having deliberately attempted to tickle her, gaslighting her ruthlessly before tickling her again.

Finally she pushed me away with great force and I tumbled off the bed onto the floor laughing.

Becoming theatrical she said: “Welcome to the Desert of the Real, whiteboy. I am thee sex leezard of thees land. And I’m smart and soulful and you need that. That’s why all the white boys come to me.”

“Hey! Stop that. Are you out of your god damn mind?”

“Ima smoke and take a nap again.”

“Cool I’m gonna have another cocktail and take a bath.” Then we both kinda faded into our own leisurely euphoric grooves.

That was life at the Tarantula Rose Motel for you. Sometimes we find these sweet dark little miracles. Christmas came and went and we got very close very quickly. She liked my music. 

At some point later we were awake at the same time and we spoke quietly, our voices still soft with sleep.

“You’re a poet.”

“I know it.”

“Don’t blow it.”

“I Know it.”

“It’s hard.”

“For a bard,” I said, cocksure in my delivery.

“I mean your dick.”

“Oh hell yeah girl that’s sick.”

“I wanna take a really big hit and pass out with your dick in my mouth,” she said, “but don’t kill me with it!”

“No guarantees!”

“Piscadoro!”

And so on and so forth. There was a lunar eclipse that night and a man at the park down at the end of the block got chased out of the park and down the block and finally apprehended right outside our motel. Apparently he’d been trying to have sex with the corpse of a dead animal at the park. That’s life at the Tarantula Rose Motel I guess. Saguara and I got in an argument about dreams. That’s usually a bad sign.

After the honeymoon phase things got really weird. I’d begun to fall for her just as she started to get paranoid and I had trouble dealing with it. She’d get very angry about people walking around and talking outside our door. We were on the second floor, and the doors to the rooms were outside, it was that kind of cheap motel. There were walkways and stairs down to the parking lot. A lot of sex work and drug people. She would get especially paranoid late at night. Her face would become still. That face! That exquisite face I loved nothing more than to kiss and caress but most of all to simply stare at from up close.

But I had my plans and life had others. I couldn’t get her to slow down and in fact she started doing more drugs more quickly. I slowed down and worked on getting more lucid so I could leave and deal with the world if I needed to. She became progressively more psychotic and delusional. At first I tried to keep up and learn the language of her individual world but this proved more daunting than expected. After being up for a few days she’d get really unhinged and yell at me.

So I spent some time out wandering the streets in happy-go-lucky fashion as I so love to do. I had some money left from the few thousand I’d made with Manuel after spending most of it paying for the room and buying Saguara some nice clothes and make up and helping her pay off a debt to a vicious pimp named Enrique from Nogales. I still had plenty of walking around money. I went out during the day and came home at night. She’d get especially paranoid late at night. Her face would change and get very different! It was obvious that she was so utterly haunted.

It was right around then that I got Strep Throat! Strep Throat! Terrible. At first I was worried I had covid but I didn’t have any of the common telltale symptoms like loss of taste. I would hate to lose my taste, it’s all I am really.  But so I had Amoxicillin which I’d kept aside for just such an occasion. I had scored off of some anarchists in Albuquerque. I would have preferred a stronger antibiotic, like doxycycline, but I the Amoxycillin would help.

Unfortunately Saguara soon became fixated on me as a disease vector and potential hostile adversary. She built a blanket fort out of the bedding which was more protein and infinite possibilities than factory fabric at this point not to gross you out but listen. She was all holed up in this fort in the corner of the room while I’m on the bed shivering and hallucinating. The beauty we’d been allowed to experience, the glory of love that we’d discovered in each other, those things were no longer with us. Things had gone from intensely intellectually stimulating and sensually pleasurable to harrowingly nightmarish and overwhelmingly surreal pretty quickly.

The lights in the room changed color, turning red. She had LED lights that she’d ordered online that changed colors and had a remote control and different settings for timed color changes. I felt the colors of our souls changing too. I don’t know who sets the timers on those. I hoped the lights would change away from red soon, I found the red light threatening. It seemed angry.

I had a high fever. We were both sweaty and delirious. I couldn’t swallow without whimpering like a little girl. But I had some money so I could just go get a room somewhere else. I felt like I might need to do that. She was showing clear signs of bad vibe overload.

“This is too much,” I said. “I’m losing it.” This was only mostly true. The truth was I had already lost it and was in the process of fleeing.

“What!!?” she cried out in alarm, her eyes bright with sudden terror.

“You should have this space to yourself,” I said. “I’ll come back soon.” I sat up and my head throbbed and I let out an embarrassing whimper as a fat juicy cockroach scurried across the floor. I felt weak and afraid and I knew she felt weak and afraid too. “I’m sick. I definitely have Strep.”

“Yeah,” she said. She seemed unimpressed or unconcerned with the actual infection but there was a kind of suspiciousness in her manner. A kind of wasted wariness. In a brief moment of insight I realized that she was seeing me as I was seeing her, she thought I was out of my mind but also sick in some serious way that made me potentially harmful to her. I was not to be trusted. I was the one who was pitiably lost in my own delusions and that I did also have something contagious and was possibly plotting against her along with everything else in the universe. She was trying not to get upset and flip out. I was working on getting out so we could both get some therapeutic spacetime to ourselves or whatever.

Ah but that’s life at The Tarantula Rose for you. Good times, bad times.

“I need to go for a little bit but I’ll be back,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed and tying my shoes, my visual field boiling, cicadas droning in my reeling mind.

“How can you do this to me when they’re closing in on me like this?” She cried at me, utterly betrayed in that way that only the paranoiacs can truly know.

“Please go to sleep,” I said, gathering up my things.

“Do you not even care how vulnerable that would make me to let my guard down like that?” she hissed, her eyes flashing. 

“Did I not already say this was too much?!!?!?!”

“I Know!!!” she started crying. I felt terrible and I wanted to hold her but I knew she’d tell me not to touch her.

The lights in the room changed from red to green, which I took to be a kind of synesthetic auspicious omen, as if the traffic light in my life had changed and I should indeed move on now. As I opened the door the bright sunlight screamed in and there were police sirens screaming on the street and someone was fighting out on the second floor walkway just a few doors down. Saguara hid in the shadows within her blanket fort.

I was putting a few last things in my bag and every time I bent over and raised myself up again my head throbbed with intense pain. I could feel the bad vibrations coming off of myself in shady, sickly-hot waves. Saguara and I were both just in terrible shape even for the likes of us who are not often in the best of shape by any measure. Sick and ablaze, dizzy with the mad orbits of whatever lost planets we’d been sentenced to in this life. I’m sorry sir, we don’t allow health in any form here at The Tarantula Rose motel, you effectively signed the consent to disintegration form upon entering. 

She was afraid. I felt sorry for her. I didn’t know what to say but I felt like I had to say something. She was crying and her eyes were haunted by noise and woundedness in which I saw some connection to the dark legacy of the history of this land called America.

“Give it a little time,” I said. “I can tell you don’t feel comfortable  and that I’m making it worse.”

“I never told you I don’t feel comfortable! I’m comfortable! Why would you even say that?” 

“You were hissing at me with crazy eyes from inside a blanket fort!” I made my own eyes crazy briefly for emphasis. She recoiled and then laughed in a strange, disconnected manner. 

“Fine,” She said, and let out a long sigh and her face changed in that way that it sometimes did, where she seems to change completely. Like she realized she had to let go and that she’d gotten carried away. A kind of resignation and letting go that made things better for both of us in my estimation even though now she seemed very sad and vulnerable and meek and tired and still strikingly beautiful for all that with the whole thing being all the more heartbreaking therefore. 

“Just a little time,” I said calmly, my fevered head throbbing, my throat nearly swollen closed. “I’m really sick and I can tell I’m weirding you out. I can give you space for a little bit.”

“You smell,” she hissed, and then whisper-cackled to herself triumphantly as I finished packing up my stuff.

“Alright I’m out. I love you I’ll be back.” I said, hurrying out with what stuff I’d been able to gather, the both of us cowering in fear of the other as I fled hunched over throbbing with self-pity and drenched in fever sweat out into the warm winter afternoon and caught the bus to Ronstadt station and transferred to the 25 bus and took that to Park and Benson and got a room at the place where they’d found that headless body the month before. Even though they’d found a headless body there it was still the safest of those motels as long as you minded your own business. In any of these hotels you wanted to make sure not to stick your head where it didn’t belong.

It was called The Last Cactus. We’d both end up there eventually, Saguara and I, at The Last Cactus. My fever would be gone, and she’d be clean, well rested and refreshed, and we would get back to talking about prime numbers and transfinity, and fall back in love for a while before self destructing again. We both knew we might die and that even though life could be difficult and dangerous and weird it was the only life we had right now and that we had much to be thankful for because we loved one another, not perfectly and not permanently but we did love one another enough to feel the beauty and glory of love itself in general, in true love, in platonic love… and this was all very important because we were too young to die but too pathological to grow out of our own self destructive tendencies together… I should’ve been the one to make her quit the hard stuff. But I myelf could barely keep it together and she was really stronger willed than I was sometimes.

And so it was that we moved back to The Tarantula Rose Motel. She’d missed it, she told me, and she wanted to go back. The name alone was enough, she insisted.

“Half the time the toilet doesn’t even work,” I laughed.

“But that name,” she said. “Tarantula Rose.”

“That one dude whose always there is a creeper and always spies in the rooms and tries the doors!”

“Tarantula Rose,” she said.

“The guy at the gas station across the street doesn’t respect me!” I protested.

“Tarantula Rose,” she said.

Soon we were back there and when we arrived she gestured with her head up at the garish red neon sign at the front entrance. It was hard to look at at first, very garish and loud to the eyes, but once I could see it better, after my eyes had adjusted, I perceived a strange beauty within the harsh garishness of the bright neon light.

“Tarantula Rose,” I said.

“Tarantula Rose,” she said. Her face.

Tarantula Rose.