From "Sic Transit" (5)

But against my better judgement we got back together a year later, at the Beat Reunion Reading at the downstate university. We snuck off to an unused classroom to fuck, and afterward argued, first about his inability to take punctuation lightly, and then about how I was too immature to fulfill my own destiny — he had me believing we'd had that past life together as Jews in Nazi Germany. I hurled a small desk at his head. Allen Ginsberg heard the ruckus and burst in and yelled at us.

Our final break came a month later, when I telephone him from the Step-Hi Lounge to say I wasn't pregnant. Indignant at being made to fret falsely, even for a second, he said it served me right for making fun of the Feast of the Assumption — he'd suddenly become Catholic. When he began ranting about the threat of hell I hung up and stumbled out, dazed by the wide, bright boulevard. These streets expect too much of me, I thought. I can't fulfill the demands of these happy avenues. In Woolworth's cafeteria I ordered a bowl of Fruit Loops. They must've been tainted by a trace of the ancient ergotism plague, because on the way home I hallucinated the triple fish Toastmaster logo in the shaded arcades. But once that crisis passed I felt relieved.

And for a few weeks I was free, free enough to finally rid myself of C by employing a ritual bath using a ewer full of water from the Sherman Park lagoon, a drop of oil of vitriol, and a pilfered undertaker's tool. I stirred the lagoon water and the oil with the tool, and intoned the ancient hymn of praise to Pluto. After an hour the sun moved behind clouds and the light through the frosted airshaft window faded and I knew my wish would be granted. But in the intervening years I've come to believe that something worse happened. It hadn't occurred to me then that when Pluto is invoked for removal of obstacles, what is removed is never completely occluded. It's sort of either/or, and you tend to get something bigger than you bargained for.

... to be continued