How to Play
There are games which have rules, which are organized and directed play. I watched a video of the late great hypnotist Milton Erickson, who regressed a woman back to when she was splashing in the water, in spontaneous play, and then, later on, the play becomes more structured, and she learns how to swim. At some point play moves from a natural tendency to have fun to a skill set.
Flirting is no different. It begins as play, in my case as a baby whose mother played and I played back. I learned to flirt with my mother because there is no consciousness at that time, just entraining, and a flirtatious woman slipped right past security. I tried to make her leave, but of course force will not work, because when you resist her she compensates by getting stronger, like a muscle. She has a disquieting habit of leaping out into the bodies of innocent women, and making odd little clucking noises to attract my attention.
“Mother please! I’ll look like a masher.” But it’s no good, I can’t leave her out there. She’ll fall into a canal or something. “Silver alert.” I said to Conceptión. It’s a weird assed thing to say to a Cuban dancer and she thinks I’m talking about her left incisor. She smiles wide so I can see it better. It might be silver or it might be an amalgam. I’m not a dentist so I don’t fucking know. I just know mother is inside of her now and is masturbating. I’m mortified at her behavior. You can’t help it when it’s your mom. The Cuban is wiggling around wondering what’s happening down in her wiggle room. The only way I can get mom back out of there is lure her out with flirtation. It’s catnip to sexual projections.
“Do you like black beans and rice?” she asked me. It was a neutral conversation starter and we talked Cuban food, then I felt her toes rubbing up under my pants, sending a message to my calf, instructing it to forward the message to the inner thigh, where it awaited further instructions. Who she was before we entangled I might never know, because mother had occupied her and was coming on strong. “It’s indecent,” I said. “Nonsense,” she retorts, “It’s the most popular game in the world.”
“Not with you, you’re my mother.”
“Your mother is dead and gone. I’m part of you now.”
A moment of clarity. I was not just the man, I was the whole thing. There was never an experience with another person where I did not know both roles, one consciously and one unconsciously. Now I had to cope with being a Cuban dancer, on top of everything else. It had been a long day. The entire structure collapsed like a house of cards and I had to choose seven of them, turn them over one at a time, to know how to proceed.
That was my religious conversion moment, when I knew the world rests on the back of a giant tortoise. It’s the compartments on the carapace where chance doth dwell, waiting for the entanglement of the attention with the symbolic world, with mystery and chance, magic and illusion, the six of clubs or the nine of diamonds, the hermit or the sun. It all begins on the carapace, the birth of divination. Then it becomes more structured with time and skill.
I played cards. I played backgammon. I played Scrabble. I played baseball and billiards, hardball and handball, I played by the rules. Over time I began to recover my intellectual certainty and stopped flirting. I said things like, “Them’s the cards that was dealt, you play’em,” and, “Jacks over eights, ladies. Read’em and weep.” I started sending the feminine part into the cards and into the slots, Lady Luck, I called her now, and even though she teased me, she’d suddenly have a spontaneous orgasm of casino chips the color of the Cuban woman’s incisor. I’d think of her and of a little cafe on the corner of 24th Street and Folsom, a block away from the Ashram.
