Cunt (11 page)

This lasted a long time, but like in a dream, I don’t know how many minutes and hours
passed.

Then there were the rustling sounds of people standing up. I opened my eyes. Everyone
was forming a double-file line that led to Ammachi.

My friends told me she was gonna bless people, so we queued up. The line was very,
very long, snaking throughout the entire large building we were in. If it had been
a line at the post office that I
absolutely had to stand in
for some reason or another, I woulda sold my soul to the person in front to give
me cuts. But this line was different. The music and nice quiet felt good. Being blessed
by an incarnation of the Goddess is also much more alluring than overnighting IRS
forms.

Before I knew it, I was next.

An attendant led me to her and kinda helped me kneel down right. Ammachi seized me
gently—if you can imagine that—and pulled me into her lap. She cradled me, murmuring
sweet chanting sounds into my ear. Her body engulfed mine and I relaxed—almost melted—into
her. My face buried in her shoulder and neck, I breathed in her smell.

This is when I really, truly started to freak on the wonder of Ammachi. After holding
hundreds of people in this manner, you would think she’d start to kinda stink. I was
nowhere near the beginning of the line. The sun set and went down, down, down to Australia
while I stood in that line. A lot of people were in her arms before me, but the woman
smelled like flowers. Not perfumey at all. Like if you covered every inch of your
bedroom floor with freshly cut bouquets of jasmine, gardenia, roses, hyacinth, carnations,
sweet peas and freesia is what she smelled like. And this smell wasn’t coming from
the flowers around her, it exuded from her skin, the fabrics of her sari and veils.
It filled my whole body, permeated my pores. Her smell made me so giddy the attendant
had to help me stand back up again. She stared deeply into my eyes and pressed flower
petals and chocolate kisses into my hand.

I stumbled away like a drunk.

Like I just had one ’dem orgasms to raise the dead.

Lordisa.

For a whole week afterwards, my entire apartment smelled like Ammachi. Everywhere
I went, I smelled her smell. Walking down the street with one of my friends, the smell
of Ammachi would assail me. I’d go, “
Damn
, do you smell that?” And my friend’d go, “Car exhaust? What?”

As Ammachi’s smell faded from my life, I started thinking about what happened when
she blessed me.

It was the first time in my life I felt
loved.
Physically, emotionally, psychically, spiritually,
deeply loved
from the epidermis of my skin that featured a couple of ugly zits, to the core of
my heart that is still traumatized by the death of my brother, abortions, meanspirited
lovergirls and other nasty hurts. It is a consciousness-broadening freak-out to feel
love in this way.

“What,” I wondered, “is the difference between Ammachi and a Whore?” Ammachi gave
me unconditional love, no questions asked. She healed me and helped me understand
more about love. I was one of many people cradled in her embrace that day. Ammachi
needs money to keep spreading her love, and I bought plenty of Ammachi paraphernalia
to support her.

She doesn’t offer erotic love to people, but any cuntlovin’ Whore will tell ya, eroticism
is a
part
of sexual love.

After Ammachi blessed me, after her flower smell took over my life for a week, after
I sat down and thought about it long and hard, I realized her gift. She clues people
in on what love really, really is. That way, it’s easier to know what love really,
really isn’t. She helps people identify love, so we can call it into our lives. In
the grand panorama of my life, I was in Ammachi’s world, in Ammachi’s arms, for mere
moments. Those moments changed me forever.

This is some serious-assed power founded in cuntlove.

The nemesis of this power is sexual cuntfear. One of the many, many, many casualties
of our culture’s negative sexual fear sits in a jail cell awaiting execution as you
read this.

Aileen Wuornos is an ex-Whore on death row in Florida. She murdered seven men. She
is the only “serial killer” ever to plead self-defense.

Not long after Ms. Wuornos walked through the prison doors, I attended Diamanda Galás’s
performance of a vocal composition entitled
Shrei X.
Ms. Galás’s three-and-a-half octave range left me reeling in pain. Her haunting,
stunning presence shattered all my fear.

I interviewed her the next day and asked, “What inspired
Shrei X?”

Because Ms. Wuornos is perceived as being “totally powerless trash,” because Ms. Wuornos
resides in an exceptionally cuntfearing society and because Ms. Wuornos’s case yielded
quite a bit of media interest, her “lawyer” seems to have come to the conclusion that
he could make a pretty penny selling her “story.”
Especially
if his client is put to death. After watching
Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer,
one is rather confronted with the idea that the people who one would traditionally
expect to support Ms. Wuornos—namely her attorneys—are plainly itching for her to
be executed as a ferocious serial killer.

Which she is not.

Aileen Wuornos is an economically challenged woman who defended herself and needs
a decent, intelligent lawyer to get her the fuck out of jail.

If I may be so bold, I would like to dedicate a portion of Kinnie Starr’s song “Buttons”
to every Whore who suffers under the influence of our sexually retarded, destructive
culture:

A few years ago a friend of mine was twenty-five cents short for bus fare. None of
us had change either. She turned to a gentleman at the bus stop and asked if he could
spare a quarter. He responded, “
What?
What
you
askin’ me for a quarter for? Girl, you got a
goldmine
between your legs.”

This sentence rang in my ears for years.

Cuntlovingly decontextualized, “a goldmine between your legs” is a wonderful sentiment.
Like what you find at the end of the rainbow. The idea of women having a goldmine
between our legs was so appealing to me, I wrote a little blues song about it:

All ladies have the power to cash in on the goldmine between our legs. Not necessarily
with the objective of financial security or spiritual fulfillment, but for the most
important reasons of all: future generations and our cuntlovin’ selves.

On a less metaphorical level, nothing but good and fabulousness would come from erecting
temples in honor of women’s sexuality, filled with women and women-trained male Whores
who offered us lessons in how to love and be loved.

Whores were in business back before the Red Sea ever thought about parting. Whores
have no labor unions, no health insurance, no retirement fund, no unemployment insurance
and no legal rights. Since a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, the nonexistent
rights and freedoms of women who understand the power of cunts conceivably more than
any other group of women in our society bespeaks the constitution of the chain we
ladies are dealing with here.

Is it a mere coincidence that women so specifically, physically associated with cunts
have no rights in this culture?

Get out.

Without honoring Whores, we cannot truly understand and transcend the dynamics of
violence, destruction and ignorance fostered in our cuntfearing society. The fact
that some women are considered “bad” is a puritanically based value judgement that
reinforces a fatal division between women. Many women allow our lives and sexual expression
to be dictated by the threat of being perceived as “Whores.” Because of thinking like
this, our society is brimming with women who have a hard time understanding, for instance,
that Whores
can be and are
sexually assaulted.

“How,” one might ask, “can a woman who accepts money for sex
be
raped?” Or perhaps, “What does a woman who puts herself in that position
expect?
”

The fact that either question is considered
at all plausible
reflects the self-defeating ignorance we ourselves perpetuate.

The measure of respect Whores receive is in direct proportion to the measure of respect
all women receive. Until there is an established, respected place for Whores is this
society, no woman will have an established, respected foundation of power.

There is no circumventing this.

Until there is a shift in consciousness about the potential of Whores, we will continue
to live in a society which offers no formally acknowledged Teachers to awaken us to
our power as sexual beings.

Ain’t no getting ’round this one either.

The fact that Whores are no longer exalted and respected is very much a reflection
of our culture’s collective sexual retardation and fear of women’s innate sexual power.

The aptly named Carol Queen is my personal prophet on Whoredom’s future in our society.