Dirty Little Secrets
for realease 12-04-06
Washington DC
During my career as a dope dealer, I devised many stashes. I had stashes for money, stashes for dope, stashes for cars and stashes for my own person.
I built a house with a room that was like a chinese puzzle box. You had to slide a piece of trim, then a baseboard, then a piece of panelling in sequence until you came to the removable floor tile which covered the buried safe. That was during my Sherlock Holmes period.
You don't really own something unless it's stashed, hidden, known only to you. This principle is expressed in the custom of not telling anybody what you wish when you blow the candles out on your birthday cake. Unless you keep the wish a secret to yourself, you don't own it and it won't come true.
People stash all sorts of things
They stash money, usually in off-shore banks or in their matresses.
They stash dope.
They stash booze (mini-bar in the toilet tank.)
They stash feelings, especially resentment.
They stash love letters and secret writings.
Sometimes it's hard to tell whether we are stashing things to hide them from others or ourselves.
When I was a child, maybe five or six, I had a fantasy that I would play in my head just before I went to sleep at night. I had a secret cave of treasures like in the Arabian Nights. It had many rooms and only I knew about it.
One room was full of naked women. Even at that age, I was obsessed with sex.
One room had a tree in it that grew dimes. It was covered with dimes. I was six, ferchrissakes. If I had that fantasy today, the tree would be covered with cashier's checks or credit cards. When the dimes fell from the tree, they fell into a vat of quicksilver.
My uncle was a dentist and he would give me small beads of mercury to play with. He showed me how to polish a dime with mercury. When you rubbed a small bead of mercury on the dime, it would shine brighter than when it was new. This was before even doctors appreciated the toxicity of the substance. There remains the possibility that my mercuric imagination is a result of my childhood poisoning and I'm really not brilliant like I sometimes imagine, but just mad as a hatter.
When I was a teenager, I stashed my pet snakes and lizards and hamsters and my stack of playboys in the crawl space under my house. There was a trapdoor in the floor of my closet. It was the looking glass, the rabbit hole, the magic wardrobe, the Bizarro World, another dimension. It was the entrance to my secret world. Even then, I was trying to live my fantasies.
Once I had a secret garden. It was a sub-terrainian pot plantation.
One Saturday I encountered a guy driving a back-hoe down the rural road not far from my homestead. He worked for the local Electrical Co-op but since it was Saturday, he was not on the clock. With the inducements of a twenty dollar bill and a case of beer, I convinced him to dig a hole for me on my property. I told him I was going to build a a swimming pool. He dug a perfect 14 x 14 pit with perfectly straight walls. The guy was a real artist.
But what I built was not a swimming pool. I built a barn over the pit and made an underground greenhouse. I grew some astounding plants in that greenhouse. I was very proud of my agricultural efforts, but I never showed it to anyone. I figured that if nobody saw it, nobody could say anything about it. The power of my garden was that it was hidden. It was my secret stash.
Fantasies are secrets, or they should be. We should hold them close and guard them like wishes from a smoking birthday candle.
It is possible that I have arrested my magic by telling you these secrets. But I have more secrets and wishes untold.
The Poet's Eye is peeking. What are your secrets?
I'll keep you my dirty little secret
(Dirty little secret)
Don't tell anyone, or you'll be just another regret
(Just another regret, hope that you can keep it)
My dirty little secret
Dirty little secret
Dirty little secret
Who has to know?
who has to know?
--All American Rejects
)
I mean, if you want to talk to me privately about it, that's one thing, but to post about these events here on this discussion board... well, frankly, I'm not too hip on it. I was joking about my maturity. I think I'm mature enough to know what should and shouldn't be shared.
