I love to sleep. And when anyone else but me wakes me up for any other reason except for dream recall -- especially the night after a show by World Entertainment War -- I am very cranky. Several budding relationships of mine have foundered because my lover refused to respect the web of rituals with which I surround my sleep. The UPS delivery person has been trained never to knock at my door before 3 p.m., lest he be greeted by a dragon.

So as I am startled awake in the here and now, the day after last night's partially brilliant, mostly failed show at the Catalyst, by what sounds like rocks hitting my second-story bedroom window, I am immediately running hot with the adrenaline of anger. The clock reads a few minutes after high noon. Leave me the fuck alone. Go away.

The problem is, now that my body is radiating adrenaline, I probably won't be able to return to sleep anyway. But it's the principle of the thing. Another ping sounds at the window. Goddamn you to the seventh level of Dante's inferno. I don't care if you're Ed McMahon in tow with the Virgin Mary here to present me with a karmic credit slip good for release from the wheel of samsara and an eighty-five-million-year vacation in heaven after I die. You can come back when I'm good and ready to rouse myself. No matter how many rocks you throw, no matter how many knocks on my door, I will ignore you.

I shove my blue rubber earplugs deep into my ears and put one of my pillows over my head.

But the disturbance grows. I can't fucking believe it: the sound of a female voice through a bullhorn. My curiosity overwhelms my outrage. I take out my earplugs. The message is decipherable only in spots. But from among the jumble of chuckles, singsong words, and portentous sighs, I can finally make out a recurring phrase:

"Rockstar, Rockstar, let down your hair."

It occurs to me that I may be listening to a cracked variation on Grimms' fairy tale of Rapunzel. Before I can decide how to respond, a fresh interruption assaults me. It's my answering machine, which is on a shelf at the foot of my bed: I neglected to turn down the volume before I collapsed in bed last night.

Damn. It's my stalker, Patricia. She's the psychotic who calls, e-mails, and snailmails me with prolific devotion in order to keep me up to date on the latest developments in the massive conspiracy she's being victimized by -- a conspiracy in which I am at the hub, along with the Queen of England, Bill Gates, baseball star Ken Griffey, the Holy Ghost, and the puppets of Sesame Street.

"Well, Mr. Sleazeball Scumbucket," she greets me, "you really kill me. I was at your show last night, of course. I wouldn't've even gone except for that dream I had where you said you'd get the Queen to chop off my little fingers and feed them to my cat if I didn't go. Why do you hate me so much? Motherfucking piece of garbage. Last night's show was a new low, even for a shithead drug-dealing asswipe like you. First you stuck all those subliminal curses in your stupid speeches. Gave me a rash on my thighs. If that wasn't enough, I had to deal with you getting your little friend the Holy Ghost to astral-project his big milky sperm right into my ovaries. Jerkoff dickweed. You hate me so much you'd even risk wrecking your inane little show just so you could torture me. Guess I showed you, Crudfucker. Didn't know I'm a wiccan voodoo priestess, did you? Used my mojo to grab a hold of that tall chick's mind and send her up on stage to mess with you. You looked so stupid when she stung my poison into you. I'm glad they had to carry you off stage like a bag of trash. I hope you're still unconscious. Now get this, you clucksucking jibberjabbering dunderstubber: I am not going to take your big dick in my mouth even if you do melt the Antarctic ice pack and flood my house away. Even if you do use your so-called poetry hexes to storm those meteors down on my head. And just keep in mind that the district attorney is a personal friend of mine."

Much as I hate to admit it, I'm entertained by this madwoman's rap. I keep listening to the end, even as the invader with the bullhorn outside repeats her absurd announcement. And besides, it's perversely comforting to imagine that I might have had some excuse, however preposterous, for my behavior at last night's show. I have never before blacked out during a performance, even in those three gigs, during my brief period of youthful folly, when I poured a blend of cocaine, Mad Dog wine, and pot into the holy temple of my body.

And yet, from the pissed-off though bemused reports of my fellow band members at 2:30 a.m., Rapunzel's magic gob of spit -- or was it a knock on my head? -- had plunged me into a daze so profound that I had to be hauled off stage and laid on a couch in the rear dressing room. For the first time in recorded history, World Entertainment War played for an hour and a half without me.

Even worse. My bandmates assured me that the fantastic love-making my darling and I enjoyed had in fact happened entirely in my own imagination. It was a damn fine hallucination, that's all.

The megaphone's lyrical crackle has died down. I'm about to drag myself to the window to investigate when I hear a sharp whap, like the sound of metal spiking wood. The whole wall of my house shakes. Next there comes a series of gritty clangs against the wall, beginning near ground level and ascending. My imagination whips up a picture of a woman climbing up my wall.

When a feminine hand lifts the window and reaches in through the curtain, I'm finally moved to sit upright and put on my glasses.

A tidal wave of auburn hair thrusts itself through the open window, some of it bound in two massive braids, followed by a vision of the woman with whom I've packed a year's worth of living and loving since I met her formally yesterday.

As the vision climbs casually into my red stuffed chair and removes her crampons, I record the details with the same concentration I devote to noticing my surroundings in a lucid dream: black tights beneath a purple silk mini-skirt; gold satin bikini top; red, white, and blue beaded vest with a picture of a baseball that looks like the planet Jupiter being hit with a bat by an angel or goddess in long white gown; and a silver beaded headband with a tail of yellow and red feathers trailing down her back.

But here's the shocker: Blooming out from beneath the nub in her bra where the two cups are fastened, there's a gnarly scar in the shape of a cross. Both marks must be five inches long. They're not manicured lines but textured gashes. Ouch.

"I was hoping you'd let down your hair or a reasonable facsimile so I could use it to climb up," Rapunzel says matter-of-factly. "I know it's kind of early for you, though, so I brought my mountain-climbing gear just in case. By the way, you've got some sleep in your left eye. Want me to get it out for you?"

In my embarrassment I don't answer but reach automatically to remove the accumulated fairy dust. Meanwhile, my fresh-from-dreams imagination is working hard to remember which of my already-extensive experiences with Rapunzel are not also engraved in her memory bank. The most important one, of course, was our fuck of the century, which she was not privy to.

Only two exchanges can I count on having been real in the traditional meaning of the word "real": the eternal moments in the women's bathroom, and the delivery, from her mouth to mine, of the elixir of saliva. Well, I guess I could count the "Eater of Cruelty" event I saw, where the pregnant woman I assume was Rapunzel in disguise gave her cracked little presentation.

When I tally up the extent of our objectively factual interactions, though, there's not really much to go on.

I can't help but notice, here in the bountiful present, that I have been given license to gaze at the veil guarding the mysterium. Rapunzel is surveying my room as she tugs off the crampons, leaving me free to lay my line of sight where I may. Her skirt is short, her legs are parted to facilitate the crampon-removal, and the view is clear all the way up. There in the crotch of her tights is not just a blank black screen onto which I can project my hallucinations, but an emblem of the bull skull, red head with silver horns. The sight of it causes me to involuntarily close my eyes, as if it were an instruction to go inward. Instantaneously, a picture erupts of the dream I had been having when Rapunzel's rocks first pinged my window.

I'd dreamt I was in a singles' bar talking with a really good-looking radical feminist gossip columnist about the art of hitting a baseball. I was telling her that she had a politically savvy animal grace that would be very suitable for playing on the socialist libertarian baseball team I managed. And that I'd be willing to install her, without even a tryout, as my starting second baseman -- in return for a favorable mention as a "sensitive man" in one of her future columns.

She was too drunk to understand what I was driving at. In a slurred voice she kept repeating, "If you sell your soul for art, make sure you get a receipt."

Rapunzel interrupts my reverie. "I must say, my dear muse," she begins in her dusky voice, "that I'm shocked by the advertisement on your curtains. Isn't it unseemly for a world-famous feminist pawn like yourself to so brazenly announce 'I want three wives'? Even if it is in Chinese?"

In the five years since I had a Chinese calligrapher paint the characters for "I want three wives" on my curtains, Rapunzel is the first to have ever translated the meaning.

I want to respond wittily. I want to say something like, "It's just my little private joke with myself. A reminder not to take my rabid feminism so seriously that I wound my masculinity." But I'm too garbled to actually get the words out yet. I'm still getting over my anger at having been awoken ... steeping in my dream ... settling into my delight at Rapunzel's divine presence ... wondering what the hell she meant when she called me her muse.

"If you're interested, I can interpret your dream for you," she offers.

"What dream?" I mumble.

"The one you just had, silly. With the radical feminist gossip columnist you were trying to seduce."

"How could you possibly know that?"

"Your dream is telling you," she says, "that it's OK to exploit your feminism as a means to try to pick up women -- as long as you make lots of self-deprecating jokes about how successful and varied your love life has become since you've become an avowed feminist."

It's almost easy to hide the feeling of intimidation that wells up in me in the wake of Rapunzel's apparent telepathy. All I have to do is switch my attention to the lust that her telepathy has kicked into even higher gear.

Next instruction to self: Got to calm down. Pace myself. I'm yearning to ask her about her version of last night's on-stage encounter, but I must stall. If this budding relationship we have is a seduction, it is an arty, convoluted, inscrutable one. My moves must be crafty, not obvious.

She strolls over next to my altar and examines the place in my room I call the "Wailing Wall." There I've assembled a museum-worthy exhibit of artifacts that document those adventures with women that've caused me to wail, both in the old-fashioned sense of grieving and in its more modern usage as a description of a vocalist who sings with bluesy authority. There are photos of the Big Ones Who Got Away -- the love affairs that never quite got consummated -- headed up by the half-Italian painter Giulietta, whose series of "Burning Chairs Sailing through Yellow Skies" paintings, numbers 1-22, included one masterpiece in which I'm the model for the Greek mythic figure of Prometheus. The thing has hung here on my Wailing Wall ever since she presented it as a gift in lieu of having an actual relationship with me. As a rather vulture-like eagle nibbles my liver, I'm gazing at the sight of a red stuffed chair tumbling aflame past a choir of female angels flying in chevron formation through a bruised yellow-orange sky.

Tacked to the frame of the painting is the last postcard Giulietta sent before she absconded from my life. Therein she informed me that she could never risk consummating a relationship with me because every instinct in her body told her to have children with me and the only children she ever wanted to have were her paintings.

Rapunzel has got her back to me, examining a dream interpretation written for me by another Big One Who Got Away: Erzebet, the teacher of my dreamwork class. Five years my senior, she had written two books, A Feminist Revision of Jung and Loving the Dream Body. Both psychic and intellectual, brilliant and loving, feminine and feminist, she had a truly ambidextrous brain. I used to swell with pride as I fantasized how one day I'd make love with the goddess who had the most highly developed corpus callosum in the western world. But that day never came. Only when it was too late -- when she had already married another man -- did she tell me that she'd always hated the way I tried to turn her into a perfect idol.

"Who's the babe there with you in bed?" Rapunzel deadpans without turning around. She's referring to the seated, three-foot-long totem doll that's leaning against the wall next to me, partially under the covers. Bought for me from a local doll-maker by my ex-lover Cassidy, Scaramouche is made mostly of roots and vines. Her legs are coyote jawbones and her hair is dried greenish-brown seaweed.

"That's my imaginary girlfriend Scaramouche," I say, finally managing to recover some of my wits. "Actually, she's half-bird, half-woman--a harpy, to be exact. She probably doesn't look too lively to you right now, but she's a powerhouse in my dreams. Takes me places. Rides me on her back. Last night she flew me to be a contestant in a male beauty contest in the radical feminist secessionist state of Santa Cruz, formerly a city in Northern California. I got to hang upside down naked from the world tree while the judges evaluated my knowledge of how the Norse god Odin bluffed his way into Freya's good graces so he could steal the magic goo from her cauldron. It was a very successful night. The crones who ran the ritual promised me a role as breeder next time I come."

"You know, Rockstar," Rapunzel replies without a breath, "I truly wish I could adore your imagination. It is so close to but so far from my ideal. It's vivid and unpredictable and all that -- which you already know so I don't need to tell you. But -- and I truly hate to break this to you -- most of the time you unleash it I feel like you're masturbating in front of me. I mean, some of the stuff in your rant at the Catalyst show last night was honest and engaging, but other parts sounded like fantasies you wrote to get yourself off."

"Is that why you pumped me full of some weird drug?" I ask.

She doesn't say a word, but merely grins and makes her eyebrows quickly flit up and down five times.

"And what's wrong with masturbation, anyway?" I say, taking a different tack. "Don't tell me you buy into the prevailing prejudice that female masturbation is liberating, sexy, and empowering, while male masturbation is pitiful, indulgent, and gross?"

"I have nothing against jacking off, as the male of the species has so eloquently named it. Some of my best friends are jack-off artists. I'm not even offended by onanistic displays of the imagination. In fact, some of my favorite patriarchal literary masterpieces are the work of jack-off artists. Finnegans Wake comes to mind. Most of Thomas Pynchon. John Ashberry. Dylan Thomas. Kathy Acker. Mark Leyner. Lots of their work reminds me of ejaculate spewed into heaven so high that it never falls to earth. It impresses but doesn't fertilize. You get the idea that the authors regularly got inspired to write by jacking off to a five-story-high billboard image of themselves."

"Well, thank you I guess for comparing my imagination to that gang."

"No. Don't thank me. Beg me to take it back. Cajole me to tell you my opinion about how you can learn to anchor your long, hard imagination in Mother Earth before spewing."

"I wouldn't mind going down in history as an artist the caliber of the ones you named."

"Here's the news, Rockstar. You can go down in history -- which will be sputtering to an end here in a few years -- or you can go down in herstory, which has a far more stellar future. You can be famous with the millions of amnesiacs who regard newspapers and magazines and TV news shows as oracles of truth, or you can be famous with the Goddess Herself. Which'll it be? You want to dribble away your kundalini in a fatuous attempt to perfect the art of the onanistic imagination, which phallocracy brought to its pinnacle long ago? Or do you want to plumb the mysteries of menarche for men, and be sanctified and certified as a genuine lesbian man, proud member of the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail?"

"Is it really so clearcut a case of either-or? Do I need to utterly purge myself of all wicked patriarchal onanistic memes before you will be my friend?"

"If you want to know a secret -- don't tell any of my co-conspirators -- I actually wouldn't mind if you preserved a healthy supply of those wicked patriarchal onanistic memes. They'd be spicy. Or maybe yeasty would be the better term. They'd be the leaven in my dough, oh yeah."

Rapunzel sings that last line, jacking up her attractiveness yet one more notch: Her voice is limber and expressive.

"Yeah," she continues, "those wicked patriarchal onanistic memes do have the tendency to keep all us fuzzy warm Gaia-worshipers from getting overly set in our nuzzle-comfy ways. Still, Rockstar, if it were up to me, I'd ask you to relocate your spermatazoic fireworks displays. Inseminate the wild blue yonder less and the good brown earth more."

All the while, Rapunzel continues to peruse my Wailing Wall. She seems fascinated with the most controversial artifact in my display: a photo of the fetus Cassidy and I aborted. We insisted the doctor let us take a roll of film so as to ensure that we wouldn't let the memory of the trauma slip into the realm of abstraction.

I am, of course, still in bed and under the covers, pyjama-less as is my custom. The whole time Rapunzel and I are talking, I'm thinking, I would fuck this woman in an instant. Just exactly like I did last night on the Catalyst stage. Or hallucinated that I did, rather. I'd fuck her with craftsmanlike devotion, sincere compassion, gentle insatiability. With my tongue and my hands alone if she's a lesbian and doesn't fancy penetrating cocksmanship. I'd fuck her as a woman fucks a woman if necessary, her clitoris rocking against my pubis bone.

I would fuck her any way she wanted. Up in a tree that thrusts dangerously over the edge of a cliff. Recovering from the flu with a grocery bag over my head. Dressed in a lobster suit lying in muddy turf at midfield during halftime at the Superbowl.

I would fuck her like a ballet dancer, wrapping her legs around me just below my waist and thrusting as I twirled her in figure eights. Like an egoless saint with telepathic powers, I would channel angelic hymns to sweet spots she doesn't even know she has. Like a Fortune 500 CEO, I would fly her to Canczn for breakfast and let her ride me cowgirl-style in a bed full of hundred-dollar bills.

I would fuck Rapunzel any way, any time, under any circumstances. Only if she would let me, of course. But then I wouldn't want her merely to let me fuck her. I'd want her to want me to fuck her. I'd want her to want me voraciously and uninhibitedly, and not desperately or neurotically. I'd want her to lust for me without even being tempted to surrender any of her sovereignty. No power games ever. I hate power games (despite the fact that Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin and company insist that hetero men know no other way to make love). And yes, I'd want her to love me -- not just because I'm a long-distance runner of a fucker, and a lyrical Buddha of a fucker, and a magnanimous poised servant (not a sniveling infantile slave) of her passions -- but because I'm all those things and I don't care that I'm all those things. That I'm accidentally those things. That as a side effect of my intense devotion to the project of cultivating her inner male and facilitating the sacred marriage of her inner male and inner female, I just happen to be a long-distance runner of a fucker, and a lyrical Buddha of a fucker, and a magnanimous poised servant (not a sniveling infantile slave) of her passions.

"The other thing about your imagination," Rapunzel says, having the nerve to interrupt my fantasy about her, "besides the fact that it's so much like spermatozoa in outer space, is that a lot of the time you're just pretending to use it in service to the Goddess. This serves as a great cover story when in fact you're whoring your imagination out to a bunch of phallocratic demons."

Uh-oh. It's one thing when I criticize myself: I enjoy it; it's a hobby of mine; it invariably inspires me to be a better person. But I'm virulently opposed to being criticized by anyone else, even Rapunzel.

"For instance," she continues. "As feminist as you claim to be, you still have this pit-of-the-soul bias against revealing the totality of who you are. I believe the issue in question -- which unfortunately is best summed up by a term that you rightfully deride as a sloppy buzz- word -- is vulnerability. You don't dare expose your softness or act defenseless or ooze a little tenderness -- at least in your public persona and in your music.

"I mean, look at how you create yourself on stage -- as a hard-edged, flaming visionary with a relentless passion for exposing hypocrisy. This is a true and beautiful part of you, but it's a fraction of the whole story. Anyone with even an elementary knowledge of physiognomy can look at your oceanic eyes and gentle mouth and tell that you're a deeply emotional creature who's kind and sensitive and eager to love and be loved.

"Have you ever -- even once -- allowed an ounce of those qualities to seep to the surface while you're on stage? No. Not that I've ever seen, and I've been to a lot of your performances. You may now and then speak sweet words, but your body language and vocal timbres belie them. You're chronically raging, declaiming, stomping, bellowing, ripping, ranting, flailing, and straining to smash through the edge of taboo. I guess you could call that emotion, but it's so one-note, such a small part of your total range. Most of who you are up there in the spotlight is a fiery spew of forceful ideas, not a cascading oracle of poignant feelings. Quixotic visions and nihilistic invocations, not the swampy ambiguities of life on Earth in the here and now. Have you ever written a single song in which you tell a story about how some person has affected you? In your between-song patter, are you ever anything but arch and inscrutable and godlike in your eerie wisdom?

"It turns out, I'm sorry to say, that you're just another goddamn fucking rockstar. You wield your imagination as a weapon to hide yourself from your audience. You use it to awe people, to stun their imaginations into submission so they'll always believe you are only and exactly who you tell them you are. Isn't that the supreme irony: You -- who rail about the entertainment criminals that're genociding our imagination -- are yourself genociding our imaginations. More softly, perhaps, but just as effectively.

"What a fabulously glamorous dionysian persona you have fabricated for yourself, and what a load of shit it is. Beloved of the Goddess my ass. You act like you're fucking embarrassed to be the gentle, emotional creature your feminine side wants you to be. You project yourself as this flaming, six-foot-tall erect penis, never ever radiating out pictures of yourself as a moist, welcoming, nurturing vulva. What a shame, and what a hateful lie. You ought to be ashamed of yourself for your hypocrisy. It's the scam of the millennium, King Penis Rockstar Unique Genius Superman Kill-Everything-That-Won't-Worship-My-Spurting-Seed trying to pass himself off as a propagandist for the Goddess. That, my pathetic liar, is what your imagination has accomplished for you."

As vicious as her rant is, she's delivering it all in even, almost sympathetic tones. Yet this discombobulates me more than if she were actually shouting. My emotional state has shifted with alarming suddenness. I'm actually starting to feel depressed, which is distressing enough, but it's made even worse by the fact that I feel bad about feeling bad. I'm disappointed in myself because the generosity of spirit I've felt since Rapunzel's arrival is so quickly degenerating into a feeling of manic deflation. I want to be holy for her, broad-minded and playful -- not a whiny little squeak of defensiveness.

"The worst of it is this," Rapunzel starts in again. "The very things you're so good at have become your virulent enemies. The unique wisdom you've distilled from your wrestle with fame has given you a false sense of security, fooling you into believing that you're immune to the soul-killing dangers you've seen so clearly. You've created a public impression of yourself as someone who resists the phallocratic star-making machinery and fights against the cult of celebrity, and yet your identity is so ensnared in this role that you can no longer even write songs about anything else.

"Have you done any songs, even one, about your intimate relationships with women? Of course not, because they'd force you to deal with feelings that are irrelevant to the persona you want to project of yourself as the media warrior and macho feminist politico. Frankly, my dear, you've become little more than a propagandist. It's true you're a benevolent propagandist who happens to promote positions I largely agree with. But that doesn't mollify the sadness I feel for you. How tragic for you that you can't allow yourself to be or feel or express anything that falls outside the tight little boundaries of your propaganda. You're a master of the art of creating an impression. You're a skilled entertainer who knows how to move people with passionate ideas. But you're afraid to confess that you also harbor a sweet, less-strident side overflowing with ambiguous emotions that have nothing or little to do with your big ideas."

I'm beginning to detect in myself the blossoming of what I can only call grief. This seems like a disproportionate response, and I fight against it, but there's no holding it back. An ancient desolation erupts. I'm suddenly in touch with some usually sealed-off zone in my psyche that is packed full of anguished accusations against life. The dominant mantra is, "It's not fair, I don't deserve this." Behind it, feeding it, is the accumulated shadow of everyone in my entire life who has refused to recognize me for who I am, everyone who has withheld the love I know I deserve. I feel myself shaking, on the verge of nausea. My heart literally hurts. I feel hatred for Rapunzel.

"What's most pathetic of all," Rapunzel says calmly, continuing her incredible onslaught, "and the thing that really makes me sick, is that you confess you're aware of the obscene amounts of egotism that are hidden in your save-the-world shtick -- and yet this seeming self-effacement turns out to be no more than a way to disarm people so they won't notice you're a megalomaniac. Every time you seem to say, 'I'm not really a flaming Bodhisattva oozing with righteous compassion, but just a regular guy with self-delusions,' you indelibly stamp your listeners with the suspicion that you are indeed a flaming bodhisattva oozing with righteous compassion. In fact, you're so eager to convince us you're a bodhisattva that you'll try to talk us all out of believing it -- only after you've planted the idea in our heads in the first place, of course.

"I've got to hand it to you. You're a virtuoso at disguising your scam -- surpassing even the evil genius of Mother Teresa, whose flimflam I saw through from the beginning. I mean, there she was with her phalanx of public relations people informing the media of what high-profile act of sainthood she was going to commit next. The woman was a rockstar-style megalomaniac. She took great pains to portray herself as the most holy person on the face of the Earth. And yet you, sir, take the whole shtick one step further. You call attention to the fact that you're hyping your own benevolence; you make fun of your aspirations to sainthood. You can't be criticized because you criticize yourself. You render yourself immune to deconstruction. And the crowd goes wild. 'We love you, St. Rockstar.' The whole thing makes me want to puke."

Though I haven't taken drugs in many years, I may as well, right now, be tripping on bad acid. Though a tiny part of me is still laughing sweetly that Rapunzel apparently cares enough about me to be here at all, her excoriation of me has triggered the release of a fountain of toxic waste in my psyche. Welling up in my mind's eye is a series of memories from my most traumatic encounters with women. Every betrayal, every schizoid episode, every hellish emotion spews up through me now as if I were a fountain of psychic vomit.

There in the mix is the moment I confronted Cassidy in the lighting booth at the Catalyst about my suspicions, and she confessed she'd been shtupping the coke dealer Carl. The nomination of Geraldine Ferraro as first woman candidate for Vice-President was unfolding on the TV in the background as Cassidy initiated, partly out of guilt and partly to get rid of me, a blow job. She rushed through it, carelessly scraping my jade stalk with her teeth, trying to get it over with as soon as possible. I found myself in the twisted predicament of receiving a half-tender, half-biting ministration from the traitor who at that moment I hated more than anyone else I'd ever hated.

Then there's the humiliating story of my ex-girlfriend (or should I say ghoulfriend?) Radinka, who fashioned herself as a "Zen decadent." That was a time in my life before I knew of the term from clinical psychology, "borderline personality." Half the time Radinka radiated a sweet poetic craziness and showered me with a quirky but tender love. The other half of the time she shamed me for having ambitions to be a successful artist and insisted that if I wanted her to stay in love with me I would have to abandon my music and poetry and either do nothing in particular all day every day or devote myself to absurd and meaningless rituals like licking her fluttering lotus every afternoon between 4 and 4:30 while she sat on the straw settee in front of the TV and watched "The Beverly Hillbillies." Except that one day I rose up in defiance at her crazy-making. I said I would indeed perform the usual ritual nibble, but this time with the TV turned off, thank you. Whereupon she angrily exploded -- not in any performance art prank or imitation of psychos she'd seen in movies, but with sincere schizophrenia. (Not that I knew the difference at that time.) Grabbing my marble Buddha statue, she began to carefully and with much deliberation smash everything in her path. I didn't stop her. Some perverse (and possibly equally schizoid) part of me interpreted the scene as a glamorous romantic melodrama. Even more importantly -- I rationalized like a lunatic -- she was delivering a personal message from the Goddess that I needed to be less attached to my possessions. And besides all that, I didn't see how I could stop her without beating her up, and I had long ago vowed never to strike a woman.

I surrendered to her insanity, giving her license to keep raging. Before night fell, she had broken all my windows with a ritual flourish, muttering some for-all-I-knew satanic incantation before each shattering. When she was through exacting that punishment, she started a bonfire in the backyard, where she incinerated much of my wardrobe and a good portion of my library.

After ruminating through my galling memories of Radinka, I don't stop. I feel compelled to review every act of female treachery. I allow the eruption of every painful love memory that has been safely repressed. My throat's a mess of choking astringency. My heart is collapsing aridity. My solar plexus is a clenching stab. I summon the time Esther cruelly mocked the new pop anthem I was so proud to have just written, comparing it to the Snoopy theme song. The time Margo invited me to accompany her to Amsterdam, only to abandon me for a rich, chubby American lawyer halfway through, leaving me to discover the crime by accident as I returned unexpectedly early from a trip to the Anne Frank Museum to find them pumping each other in our hotel room.

Is it fair to count the wounded women I took under my wing who then traitorously rejected my attempts to fix them? Probably not. Most of them didn't willfully betray my efforts to help them detonate their dormant potential. Nevertheless, my memories are awash with the sting of all my failed reclamation projects. Like that ingrate Ariel, who took my money to enroll in community college and then dropped out after three weeks so she could go back to waitressing. And deceitful Sammi, who begged me to let her stay at my house for a while, neglecting to inform me that she was fleeing a jealous, psychotic boyfriend who would track her down and try to kill us both. And Trisha, who asked to borrow my car so she could go apply for food stamps but went instead to buy some methamphetamines. I only found out that's what she did because the car was stolen, and when the police came they found the bag of stuff.

As I gaze at Rapunzel, I'm fighting hard to remain objective, to not let myself be sucked down into the abyss of my dread. As saturated with anguish as I am, part of my awareness is split off into the understanding that it's inappropriate to blame it all on her. Without trying to suppress any of the crush of sensations in my body -- the spiraling fury in my chest, the clutch of grief in my throat, the squeezing throb of bitterness in the back of my head -- I also reach for some poised perception about her, free from my projections.

Strangely, in contrast to the part of me that wants to crucify her for crucifying me, there is another part of me that castigates the pitiful little wimp in me who's so hurt by it all, and who wants instead to see in Rapunzel an all-knowing Goddess delivering a pure oracle, a difficult gift, from beyond the realm of her human personality. This aspect of me longs to interpret every single thing she does, no matter how seemingly cruel, as a divine blessing offering me the guidance I've refused to receive from any other source. As if she were infallible, beyond reproach, inhuman.

I wish I could say that this is a fresh and spontaneous response to the innocent mystery of the moment, but it's really just another ancient habit of mine. Just another groove. For as long as I've called myself a feminist -- since my epiphany at the hands of Robert Graves' The White Goddess at age nineteen -- I've been slapping this type of exalted interpretation on the crazy behavior of all the women in my life. The morning after Radinka apocalypsed my windows, poetry books, and pants, I enjoyed a scintillating meditation which confirmed for me that the Goddess had indeed used Radinka to interrupt my dangerously waxing attachment to comfort.

So in my grand tradition, Rapunzel's rant has provoked a dual roar of blame and worship. She's the incarnation of the devil, the embodiment of life's refusal to give me everything I want, while at the same time she's the Sweet Mother who knows what I need more than I do. Just another variation on the trite old virgin-whore reflex, eh?

No. Wait. There is one difference this time. A part of me is amused by it all. Is detached. Is enjoying it for the spectacle that it is. Rather than ridiculing myself for my infantile narcissistic complaining, and instead of leaping to my automatic transcendence, I have the notion to regard both currents as half-truths that deserve criticism and compassion. And once this brilliant idea sets in, I notice that I'm relaxing my intense self-absorption. I feel ready to ask: Beyond the cacophony of my feelings and projections, who is Rapunzel really?

It occurs to me that she rightfully deserves a part, not all, of both my blame and worship. Though my feelings may be exaggerated because they touch the root of my alienation from life, they are not entirely hallucinations or projections. And yet I also see that most of who Rapunzel is right now is something I've never seen before in my life. Something for which my past experiences provide no context. My task is to behold her without prejudice, to climb out of myself and find out who she is free of the accumulated weight of my opinions and expectations.

As I contemplate how I should go about this, I'm drawn to her eyes. They periodically flash me an eerie knowing look, as if to reveal the eyes behind her eyes. It's a coordinated gesture: As she opens her lids wider, her eyebrows rise slightly, she draws her head up and back, and her arms open in a slight arc that seems to indicate both surrender and welcome.

I take this to be a higher and more beautiful form of self-consciousness -- self-consciousness not as an awkward feeling of being out-of-sync but as a meta-communication, a nonverbal notification that her message to me is not just what it literally seems to be. This certainly dovetails with the fact that she has never raised her voice into sneering anger even once. I fantasize she's showing me that her apparent cruelty is a ritualized performance given in a spirit of love and concern. I speculate that part of her hates to be so mean but knows she must be in order to snap me out of my trance.

At the same time, I leave open the possibility that what she's feeling is just plain self-consciousness, the discomfort of telling a relative stranger intimate insights about himself. Maybe there's also a flawed part of her that's thrilled to be able to wield the power of inflicting cruelty.

Finally, plumbing to an even more refined intuition, I conclude that both varieties of self-consciousness are present, and that, furthermore, the "higher" one is not "better" than the "lower" one. They come together as an inseparable pair. They need and complement each other.

Likewise, the possibility that Rapunzel is giving me a valuable gift does not contradict the possibility that she's abusing me. She may be both a perfect goddess delivering a difficult enlightenment and an imperfect human egotistically relishing the intense impact she's having on me. Again, it doesn't make any more sense to say that one is "good" and one is "bad" than it does to suggest that the sunshine is my friend and the rain hates me.

A surprising urge breaks through at this point. I experience it first physically. The best way I can describe it is that a lid blows off the top side of my solar plexus. As if a fermenting host of images had been trapped within a boil or tumor in my belly and was now escaping like the upwelling waters of a fountain. My first impression is that this is a load of poison. But as the toxins stream from my solar plexus up through my heart, the sensation mutates. My surprising intuition is that my heart is turning the toxins into medicine. I'm reminded, in vivid physical form rather than the usual intellectual experience, of one of my favorite passages from an old alchemical treatise, Book of Lambspring:

A savage dragon lives in the forest,

Most venomous he is, yet lacking nothing:

When he sees the rays of the Sun and its bright fire,

He scatters abroad his poison,

And flies upward so fiercely

That no living creature can stand before him,

Nor is even the Basilisk equal to him.

He who hath skill to slay him wisely,

Hath escaped from all dangers.

Yet all venom, and colors, are multiplied

In the hour of his death.

His venom becomes the Great Medicine.

He quickly consumes his venom,

For he devours his poisonous tail.

And this is performed by his own Body,

From which flows forth glorious Balm,

With all its miraculous virtues.

Hereat all the Sages do loudly rejoice.

The biggest mystery to me is why I am focusing in on and following the unfoldment of these physical sensations. Unless I'm making love or meditating on my breath, it's very unlike me to tune in to the insides of my body. And to be somatically aware in the midst of a traumatic conversation is so unprecedented that I'm sure it's because Rapunzel is performing some kind of magic on me.

I feel the fountain of once-noxious medicine reach my throat. It shrinks into a hard, uncomfortable knot at first but then bursts apart into a fine, palliative mist that fills me with the same kind of sweet joy I feel when I'm singing a song I love. Meanwhile, a new upsurge departs from the very base of my spine and heads northward. Unlike the first wave from the solar plexus, this one's launch doesn't sicken me. On the contrary, it is the very embodiment of reckless virility. Molten, indomitable, pugnaciously blissful, it's like raw lust -- until it filters through my heart. There, something alien is added to the old familiar texture. What? A tincture of bemused benevolence? A hint of the spirit of tender nuzzling? While its bellowing command to be satisfied is not emasculated in the least, its fire has been moistened; its crazed, impersonal relentlessness has accepted intimacy as an alloy. As this second eruption arrives in my throat, it awards me with a loopy sense of prideless confidence. I fantasize that there will come a time in the future when I will be able to say exactly what I mean all the time.

I have no idea where these subtle currents in my body originate: in actual energy shifts within my organs, or in flows of blood and hormone, or in twitches of my nervous system. I only know that they are palpable, and that as I allow my awareness to blend with them, they unleash a flow of gnosis. Images materialize, not in my mind's eye exactly, but in my heart's eye, and my solar plexus' eye, and my throat's eye. It's as if there are brains all up and down my spinal cord. And the information they're imparting to me is imbued with a humble certainty. It's nothing like the jerky machinations of what Zen Buddhists call the monkey mind.

The first message that erupts is that for the sake of my physical health and for the prosperity of my creative artistry, I must forgive all those women whose betrayals bubbled up in the wake of Rapunzel's psychic attack on me. Cassidy, Radinka, Margo, Esther, Ariel, Trisha, Sammi -- every one of them. Not just forgive them through some Pavlovian reinterpretation of their actions as being inspired by the Goddess. Not just forgive them in an all-purpose, abstract pardon, lazily invoking an automatic prayer.

The message is that every single memory of violation that I harbor must be individually recapitulated and purified. I must recreate in my imagination the precise scene of me and Cassidy in the lighting booth at the Catalyst, with Geraldine Ferraro giving her acceptance speech in the background and the mixed look of disdain, guilt, and impatience on Cassidy's face. And then I've got to forgive her with intelligence and eagerness, not blankness and resignation. I'll work to understand what part I played in the unfolding of our destiny, and forgive myself. I'll surgically remove the memory from its original context, which was rife with my narcissism and ignorance, and transplant it into the part of my soul where I understand that love is the only law of success that matters, love ensouled by play, and that not just for Cassidy's sake but for mine I want to bless everything about her, the "good" and the "bad," forever.

Here is the cosmic joke I'm channeling from the mysterious intelligence that is snaking through my body below my head: In flushing away my resentment and accusations, I bestow a boon on my physical health. In pouring out my blessings, I invite the divine kundalini to flow in and inspire my creative artistry. In forgiving everyone who has offended me, I am doing myself a very great favor. I am loving myself.

Rapunzel is wrong. My desire to rake in glamour and glory, to get people to love me and give me what I want, has been only fifty-one percent of my motivation to act altruistically. Forty-nine percent of me has been faithful to the bodhisattva agenda because I love to see people healthy and happy.

And watch out, because I'm just about to turn the whole accounting technique inside-out. I'm on the verge of proving, with Rapunzel as my guinea pig, that there's a way to subsume both motivations under the same intention. I am going to show that being good to Rapunzel, being good to Cassidy, being good to anyone and everyone, friend and stranger and foe, is the ultimate trick in winning the game of life. Not just in the sniveling, passive Christian sense, because it's the nice thing to do, but also in the greedy pantheistic sense, because it's the one sure method for me to get everything I could ever want.

Forget the strenuous twelve-hour sitting meditations on the Zen planks; forget mastering the occult words of power and the greater banishing ritual of Western ceremonial magick; forget all the thousand-page tomes detailing the self-denials and contortions the human being must go through to obtain enlightenment. I say the secret of success is to bestow blessings. As I bestow blessings, I seduce the attention of all the best muses. As I bestow blessings, I relieve myself of the constricted, unplayful, dead-serious attitudes that repel the arrival of all good things. As I bestow blessings, I dissolve the energy blockages in my body that could turn into disease, and I attune myself to the secrets of immortality. In this mystery, selfishness and unselfishness fuse in a hybrid which is both and neither.

I can't say this aloud yet, Rapunzel, you gorgeous sphinx trickster, but I will as soon as you learn to trust me: I bless you, yes, because I want you to think the world of me and I want you to fall in love with me; but I bless you also because I want you to thrive and prosper regardless of what you'll do for me; and I bless you because being good to you is the same as being good to me even if you never speak to me again. They are all the same blessing.

I've been silent for a long time, having pulled my head under the blankets during my meditation. As I emerge again, I see that Rapunzel is examining what's probably the most embarrassing item on my Wailing Wall: a description of my fantasy of living in a big house in the Berkeley hills with three wives and our who-knows-how-many children.

"'Whose turn is it to be serviced by hubby tonight?'" Rapunzel reads. "'Or should we just simplify matters and sleep four abreast for a change?'"

Rapunzel looks up as I poke my head out. She breaks into a stunning, crooked grin. With regal silliness, she strides over to my bed and descends to her knees. She clasps my head, pulls it towards her and smooches me ... on the nose. Weird. Then she's back up and sitting on the red chair.

Despite the subtlety of my meditations, when I finally speak I can't help but revert to my jive-talking, smart-ass persona. "Wow," I begin, showing at least enough restraint to speak in a humble whisper. "You divined all that shit about me just from studying my performances? Sounds like despite what you say, I don't really hide the totality of myself very well after all."

"I don't think of it as the 'shit' about you, Rockstar. I regard it as raw material of the finest quality. Valuable ore."

"Does that mean you're still interested in accepting my application to the Menstrual Temple? Is it time to schedule my menarche?"

"About all we've determined thus far, lesbian boy, is this: You're eligible and ripe to take the tests that could win you the right to kidnap yourself -- thereby earning you admission to our holy order."

"When do we start? Raw recruit Rockstar reporting for duty, Captain Rapunzel."

"You'd better find out what the tests are before you jump so glibly in."

"I've been prepping for this moment since I memorized Robert Graves' The White Goddess at age nineteen."

"Your tests have nothing to do with accumulating more second-hand information, and everything to do with stalking gnosis."

"You mean you're not going to send a coven of witches to kidnap me on the night of the new moon and take me blindfolded deep into the woods to a ritual menstrual hut lined with murals of crocodile-headed goddesses where I'll be commanded to dance idiotic dances in celebration of my liberation from patriarchal dignity and then demonstrate my mastery of the secret words of power that open up all thirty-two astral doors on the matriarchal Tree of Life? And all the while the concentrated prayers of the coven will be swelling my ego larger and larger, forcing it to grow more and more intoxicated with its own dizzying power to share in these mysteries, until at the climax of the initiation ceremony my ego has become so huge, so undeflatable, that it overlaps the ego of the Divine Intelligence on all sides. In effect I will then have sneaked into enlightenment through the back door; not, as the Buddhists teach, by shrinking and shrivelling up my ego until it disappears but by puffing it up so big and strong there is nothing that it does not encompass."

"Our 'initiation,' if that's what you want to call it," Rapunzel replies coolly, barely acknowledging my riff, "begins not with ceremonies, but with very practical, very earthy tasks. I'll tell you the first few now so you know what you're getting yourself into."

"Shoot."

"Your first assignment is to dissolve your band World Entertainment War and quit the rock music business. Your second assignment is to get a job as a janitor."

"What's my third assignment," I reply after a stunned pause, "shave my head and starve myself of sleep and eat nothing but white rice and sell incense in airports to support the coke habit of the Big Boohoo of the Menstrual Temple? Or maybe you'd just like me to take out a life insurance policy that names the Menstrual Temple as beneficiary, and then gulp some strychnine-laced Kool-Aid?"

I can't believe she's serious.

"You have every right to be suspicious and resistant. I'd be disappointed in you if you weren't. Slavish devotion to authority is near the top of our ugly list. But we have very good reasons for asking these things of you. Though it's literally impossible for you to believe this right now, they would create wonderful changes in your life. They certainly aren't for our benefit. And besides, you have absolute freedom of choice. We're not begging you to join us."

Until this moment, I have been playing with Rapunzel. I have been riding along on the half-conscious fantasy that we are like sophisticated children enjoying a game, and that playing the game is more meaningful and important than any real consequences that might come out of it.

It's the story of my life. I always do this. It's one of my trademark assets, even as it's a signature flaw. Maybe it's because I'm a creative artist who has had a relatively trauma-free life. Most of my important decisions revolve around how to produce those simulations of life called songs and poems and performances. Imagination is the legal tender in my little corner of the world. My devotion to it makes it easy for me to act as if I'm still living in the land of childhood, as if everyone I encounter is eager and willing to join me in that land for as long as we're together. It could be the clerk at the gas station or my band-mates or my mother. I pretend or assume or theorize that they're all just a prod away from sharing my obsession with turning every experience into a tricky myth. Maybe they're normally entranced by the plague of literalism that stinks up the world, but when I touch their lives -- so I reason -- they'll play along with me for a while, as we might have when we were five-year-olds or before we were born, when we were angels.

Until this moment, I have been convinced that Rapunzel understands this perspective implicitly, and has accepted all of its rules. Now I don't know. I can still manage to interpret her "assignments" as gambits in a meta-game, but the consequences are more real than I would like. Couldn't she have asked me to do something more playful and mythical, like let her walk me as a dog on a leash downtown or find out what it's like to wear a menstrual pad and a crown of lilies for four days?

I've loved this flirtation with "menarche for men" from the "Menstrual Temple," which for all I know exists only in the imagination of Rapunzel. I do, after all, have a long history of being drawn to half-mad women whose imaginations so thoroughly bleed over into their "real" lives that it's often difficult to know what's objectively true about them. I guess maybe my attraction to the Menstrual Temple has really just been a stand-in for my fascination with Rapunzel's imagination. I'm not sure I have truly believed there is such a thing as the Menstrual Temple; or if there is, whether I would want to accept all the actual consequences of aligning my fate with its. I half-assedly assumed I was just playing out an especially amusing seduction that would lead me to Rapunzel's love, not some real cult that was going to ask me to make over my life.

But let's assume for a moment that there is an actual entity called the Menstrual Temple and a real ritual called "Menarche for Men." As intriguing as they sound, I can't truly envision myself throwing away my rock career to partake. What benefits might they bestow on me that could possibly justify such drastic action?

"Before I even consider your outlandish proposals, Rapunzel," I say finally, stalling. "I'm going to have to ask you to sell me on the advantages of Menstrual Temple membership. Do you have a brochure or something? A prospectus?"

"What if I told you the Menstrual Temple has a drug-free strategy to insinuate you into altered states that are so far beyond the lucidity and ecstatic intensity of any dreams you've ever had -- and I know you've had a lot -- that you will swear you've discovered a new dimension to live in? This dimension has all the fabulously erotic and kinesthetic adventures of the dream realm plus all the solid reality and recall of your waking hours."

"I'd be piqued, but I don't know if I'd be piqued enough to renounce one of the great loves of my life."

"And what if I told you that an even greater love of your life will remain unavailable to you until you graduate from World Entertainment War?"

"Could you find it in your cold cruel heart to give me a hint of what that bigger and better love of my life might look like?"

"I don't want to create any false impressions. The majestic gift that's awaiting your transmutation is so far beyond your current ability to conceive that any clues I might drop would be misleading. However, I will reveal this much. It would not be a lie to say that in the last hour you have been freshly delivered into the hint of a watered-down version of the majestic gift."

I can't help it if my heart and all the erotic nerves it's linked to leap to the conclusion that maybe possibly hopefully the majestic gift in question is Rapunzel herself -- not just in the getting-to-know-each-other mode she's unveiling now, but in her refulgent splendor, primed by my love to engulf me with a sweet cataclysm of tender mercy. If I could believe that quitting World Entertainment War would annihilate obstacles that kept Rapunzel from signing on as my girlfriend, I would sincerely consider risking what was otherwise unthinkable. In the course of my romantic career, I have, after all, pulled off some extremely strenuous stunts and sacrifices in the name of love.

I recall the comical initiations Cassidy made me go through before she'd let me fuck her. Singing "The Impossible Dream" in crowded cafes, maintaining a .350 batting average in a softball league, shoplifting doll furniture for her from every toy store in town. Then there was that time -- I almost forgot about this one -- when she had me strip stark naked at 3 a.m. and ride my one-speed bike four miles straight uphill from downtown to the university -- while maintaining a hard-on the entire way. She followed me, of course, in her yellow VW bug, to make sure I didn't cheat.

Performance art stuff like that, though, was fun and, moreover, an addition to my repertoire as an artist -- not a subtraction, as Rapunzel is proposing. Sacrifice is a trick I've always been willing to try if and only if it pumps up the luster of my dionysian lovability.

"OK, Rapunzel," I say. "You've got me fermenting. But tell me this. Why oh why -- I can't imagine why -- is the price for these treasures you're teasing me with so unreasonable? How could my access to them require the destruction of my music career? It doesn't make any sense. From everything I can tell, your philosophy of life is to do what you love to do. Well, I love singing and dancing and being a Dionysian priest. I love being possessed by the snake god."

"I didn't say you had to stop singing or dancing and being a Dionysian priest, nor do I mean for you to divorce the snake god. My point is to get you to do what you love, only better. To figure out how to untangle your divine motivations from the diseased motivations, and then channel your wonderful talent into sacred pranks that will accomplish the only thing worth doing."

"Which is?"

"Ahh. Yes. More about that later. If and when you decide to kidnap yourself. If and when you commit to cultivating the states the alchemists call putrefaction and nigredo: melting down the half-sick, half-beautiful containers your libido inhabits, and returning for a time to what we affectionately call primordial chaos."

"I'm scared."

"That's a good sign. It means you're actually entertaining my proposal."

"But it's all so sudden."

"There's no rush. You know what the occultists say: The magician proceeds as if she has all of eternity at her disposal."

"I still wish there was a brochure you could give me to study. A prospectus. A holy tome."

"Those types of artifacts exist, but they're exactly what you don't need right now. You're overstuffed with intellectual knowledge and second-hand information. The most precious and instructive experience for you is what we in the consciousness industry call gnosis. Direct perception unmediated by other people's theories."

"So where can you steer me if I want to gather more data to help me make my decision? What should I do?"

"How about this? How'd you like to sample a class at our Dreamtime University? I can arrange for you, anytime you want, to get a fresh hot delivery, in your dreams, of infomania that'll be quite helpful to you as you carry out the prerequisites for signing up with the Menstrual Temple. When would you like it? Tonight?"

I'm skeptical. What is she, the most powerful psychic in America, able to induce a specific dream in my psyche on command?

"In fact," she continues, "I can absolutely guarantee that it'll be the most real dream you've ever had. The most detailed. The most voluminous. Not only have you never had a dream as long and rich as this one -- you've never come anywhere close to remembering so much of any dream as you will of this one. It's as if the dream itself will give you a memory upgrade so you can remember it.

"And you should also know that there's plenty more where this superdream comes from. Membership in the Menstrual Temple has thousands of perks, but the privilege of communing with superdreams at Dreamtime University has got to be one of the biggest luxuries."

"Anything else?"

"Lots of treasures besides the ones I've told you about. I'll just mention one other one."

"Free tickets to the dark underbelly of Disneyland?"

"Nope. Better than that. An end to your low wages."

"This janitor job I'm going to get must be pretty lucrative."

"You'd be surprised."

Rapunzel is beginning to put her crampons back on.

"So does your offer to arrange a superdream for me have any strings attached?" I ask.

"If I formally beg you for it, am I committed to do your will forever? I mean, if I agree to accept your fresh hot delivery, do I automatically have to quit the band?"

"Of course not. Think of it as a free sample. An introductory offer. You know, the first one's free, but the price goes up once you're hooked."

"OK. I accept. Now as to when I'd like it delivered. The band's got another gig tonight, and -- well -- I get into a pretty wacky state. Always have my beers and coffees. Always dance myself into exhaustion and absorb the id-charged projections of hundreds of people. My dreams the night after are usually pretty fragmented. So anyway, tonight wouldn't be a good time. How about tomorrow night?"

"You're on. By the way, do you know what 'rockstar' backwards is?"

"Ratskcor?"

"Yup. Rat's core. And now it's time for me to go."

"Can I get your phone number?"

"I'm afraid you'll have to wait for me to contact you. Too bad you're not already signed up to the Menstrual Temple, because then you could bypass the more mundane forms of communication and reach me directly through the Drivetime."

"And what exactly did you say the Drivetime is?"

"Next time, Rockstar. Gotta go."

She grabs the bull skull origami on my altar, the one she'd given me a month ago during the party at the newspaper offices.

"Maybe you're ready to receive the oracle I tried to handfeed you way back when. Why don't you finally open this sucker up?"

She flings the origami at me, climbs out the window, and scoots back down the way she came in.

I drag myself out of bed and peer out at her. The woman is fast. She's already ripping off her crampons. Soon she's scurrying out of my yard, brushing by the eight-foot-tall bushes that line the front boundary.

I lower myself down on the sacred spot on the chair where she'd been sitting and examine the origami. For the first time I notice on the back, in very tiny letters, the words "open me." Wonder how I missed seeing that until now.

Unfolding it, I find a text with print so small I can barely read it. I fetch the magnifying glass that came with my Oxford English Dictionary and discern the following:

The Televisionary Oracle

In the best-known version of the Greek myth, Persephone is dragged down into the underworld by Pluto and held hostage. But in earlier, pre-patriarchal tales, she descends there under her own power, actively seeking to graduate from her virginal naivete by exploring the intriguing land of shadows. Which of these approaches to higher (or should we say lower?) education do you prefer: imposed against your will or initiated under your own power? It really is up to you, and you should decide pretty soon. Maybe it'll help you make your decision if we tell you that according to ancient lore, the dusky realm to which Persephone journeyed is a place of hidden wealth.