(part 2)
   Which suited me fine, & the others there. We
felt a bit less mundane commuting from our day jobs at bookstores,
warehouses, & Deep Ellum boutiques, back to a haunted mansion to
sleep where wind sang in the cracks & crannies at all hours & a
hundred buckets barely sufficed to get it through a thunder
boomer.
   I was a lot like that myself; my walls weren't
solid but rustled with subtle voices, & my emptiness loomed in
the neon night with only the barest of candle flickers visible to
people rushing past to gain the freeway. Something within me
also was rushing past, barely glancing at the startling lines of a
landscape of ghosts.
   They said it was haunted. But no one had ever died
here; & how can you have a haunted house without deaths? No, no
one had died here that we knew of, in a hundred years of being
first a church & then a hippie rooming house. No deaths, though
once a runaway they allowed to crash in the basement had tried to
kill herself by slitting her wrists. Supposedly the ceiling was still
stained by a spurt of blood, but i never looked for it. Not in the whole
time i stayed there.
   That was the summer of Mazzy Star. From every
half-open sliding door as i walked to my own snug garret on the
brokendown creaky balcony, the mournful soft strains of Mazzy
Star's second album would always be playing. It sounded beautiful
& debauched, the way we wanted to be.
   Instead, we were children. Children with candles.
Nothing, i think, will ever be more beautiful to me than the gold that
was flung across the staircase at sunset, which i watched every
chance i got: a mystic incandescence, poured upon the worn &
ageless oak-panelled wall.
   It created in me moods i couldn't express, couldn't
shake. And so i embarked on a project (we all had "Projects"): i would
paint invisible pictures. I don't know now what it was supposed to
mean, though i thought i knew at the time. I still have the pictures.
   You look at them through 3D glasses, the cardboard
kind with one lens red & one lens blue. This destroys your sense of
colors--you just see flashing & contradictory input. It doesn't hold
still. It kind of makes you queasy after awhile. But it's overwhelmingly
elsewhere. The sense of depth is nothing like real space; i wasn't,
even in that, a realistic painter. It's rather, an abstraction that
uses the elements of depth perception to give a sensation like
nothing else that has ever existed, & which cannot be described.
   But sometimes i hear Mazzy Star again &
i know. For a moment i know. Or maybe i just remember.
   Five years i lived in the church. And to think
it all began with that radio program.

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