Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories

by Cookie Mueller

Everyone wanted to be a star. Everyone, all over the world, wants to be in movies. It's modern human nature, a new biological urge, a twentieth-century physiogenesis. People feel compelled to be on the screen.

There comes a time when even the most optimistic people, like myself, realize that life among certain humans cannot be easy, that sometimes it is unmanageable and low-down, that all people are quixotic, and haunted, and burdened, and there's just no way to lift their load for them.

Divine didn't say a word. He just picked up the bus, the whole thing and stood it up, back on its tires. Just like Superman-woman. I think I was just standing there with my mouth open. “God, you're really strong,” I said, “I can't believe you just lifted this thing. I'm flabbergasted. You oughtta go into wrestling or weightlifting or something.” I couldn't get over it. “Must have been adrenalin strength,” he said and he got back in the driver's seat. “Well, get in,” he said. “We going shopping or what?” From that day on I always felt really safe when I was with Divine. He wasn't afraid of anything.

Why does everybody think I'm so wild? I'm not wild. I happen to stumble onto wildness. It gets in my path.

Each friend I've lost was an extraordinary person, not just to me, but to hundreds of people who knew their work and their fight. These were the kind of people who lifted the quality of all our lives, their war was against ignorance, the bankruptcy of beauty, and the truancy of culture. They were people who hated and scorned pettiness, intolerance, bigotry, mediocrity, ugliness, and spiritual myopia; the blindness that makes life hollow and insipid was unacceptable. They tried to make us see. All of these friends were connected to the arts. Time and history have proven that the sensitive souls among us have always been more vulnerable.

The horrror of AIDS