Delilah Mason

Chapter 6 – Delilah Mason

Giambone found a woman, or she found him. It wasn’t difficult. Before the streets and the missions became his home, Giambone was a regular on a few Hollywood party circuits. When he left the Plutoids and reconnected with his family, Jack introduced him to many of his entertainment business friends and associates.

“We need to baptize you in pussy juice, Ton, to wash the stench of religion off you,” Jack told him.

“Do I smell that bad?”

“To high heaven, brother. How’d you ever turn your back on rock ‘n’ roll?”

“Jack, it’s not just about music all the time.”

“Blasphemer! Don’t say that. That’s all there is, if you wanna reach the masses. Now come around Spago’s at seven or so. I bought the place for the night. It’s Rob Halford‘s birthday. If I can’t get you laid there you can disown me again.”

“I dunno.”

“No ‘I dunnos,’ Ton. Lemme hear you say it.”

“Say what?”

“Fuck the Plutoids.”

“C’mon, Jack. That’s ridiculous.”

“No. Say it. It’s good for you. Say it. Fuck Reverend Pluto.”

“Fuck the Plutoids.”

“Good. See you at seven.”

Giambone had no trouble meeting women at industry gatherings. After seven years of seclusion in the Plutoids, he was shy at first. But soon he came to love the attention lavished on him whenever he attended a party, and the news quickly circulated that he was the brother of Jack Giambone. All he had to do was smile, laugh, and manage a little small talk. One after another striving women sidled up to him over the course of an hour or two at any one of these breezy soirees. He became adroit at mastering the nuance of insipid conversation and arch suggestion. After a few months practice he could telegraph his desire in a few alluring words that women found irresistible, if they heard them at all:

“Spend the night with me.”

They found his candor charmingly atavistic. He was never turned down.

There was no reason to turn him down. While no male model, on appearance alone he offered no offense. At about 5’10, he was not overly tall. His weight averaged around 185 pounds, depending on how much he was drinking. He had impish features – a straight, moderately sized nose with eager nostrils. His skin was Sicilian, the color of Tyrrhenian waters when the sun cools under ripe clouds scuttling in from Tunisia. When he was sober, the flesh of his face seemed well-nourished and healthy. His lips were full, symmetrical and slightly moist, as though he were savoring a thought, or a succulent dish that was smooth and exquisitely spiced. His teeth were straight and white. He stood like an impresario, or an old world grandee, with the puckish self-possession of a vaudevillian master of ceremonies. When relaxed, he seemed poised to embrace whomever’s company he was enjoying, circling them with his arms and drawing them tightly to his chest, laughing in an incongruous falsetto, an arpeggio of notes cascading around their ears, sometimes going so far as to the pinch their cheeks, charming all of them with these bursts of his affection. They were gestures that left people feeling privileged, singled out by no less a personage than the brother of the famous Jack Giambone.

This was the heart of Giambone. At his most fundamental and essential he was a sentimental creature. And it was unfortunate that the objects of his affection could not see him as its exclusive source. Nothing Giambone said or did was received by others without an attendant thought – that his was a surrogate friendship for the one they preferred with Jack. From the moment his brother became famous, Giambone never had a friendship that was uncorrupted. Jack’s fame hung over him like a hilltop after a heavy California rain. Everyone was exalted, his stature embellished and improved, simply because the brother of Jack Giambone had hugged him, or pinched her cheek, or fathered her child. The world clamored for Jack. If it couldn’t have him, Giambone was the next best thing. He was not the supreme validation they would have secured had it been from Jack, but it was good enough for most. Giambone was not greatness itself, but he was just a step removed.

Giambone knew this. He tried not to care about it. At doleful moments he confided to friends like Carson (people he had known long before Jack Giambone was a household word) that his brother’s fame was a frustration and a burden. But largely he let it bring him whatever gifts washed up at his feet. One of these was Delilah Mason.

They met at Morton’s Steakhouse in West L.A. Giambone’s sister Trinity worked for a record producer at a small label owned by Jack. Someone in her office was celebrating her thirtieth birthday. Anxious about her older brother’s status as a bachelor, Trinity liked to invite Giambone to these kinds of affairs, hoping he’d find a good woman and settle down. Why she thought he would find a good woman in Hollywood was something they never questioned. But miserable as it was, they lived there. Hollywood was all they had to work with and they were part of it.

Delilah came along as a friend of a friend. She worked in one of the hundreds of satellite industries that greased the movie works. She was a personal trainer and a yoga instructor, she told him.

“You must be very flexible.” He was aroused by her.

“Do I have to be? I think of myself as uncompromising.” She was thrilled to be talking to him, and right from the start she knew she could toy with his affection.

“I meant your body.” Her eyes were lively, her figure deadly.

“Are you thinking about it?” She thrived on being an object of desire.

“I’ve committed unspeakable actions upon it in my mind.” He knew he could lose all caution with her.

“And here I thought you were different.” She wanted to provoke him.

“I’m not gay,” he said without hesitation, in case she was mistaken.

“I’m only attracted to gay men.” This was her cruel side. She was accustomed to being begged.

“I can persuade you to cross over to the other side.” It was fatal – he wanted to get lost in her.

“You can try. I won’t say it won’t be misguided.”

“What’s life without a little tragedy?” He could think of nothing but joy.

“What’s tragic without love?”

She lived alone, renting the ground floor of a duplex bungalow in an immigrant neighborhood in Echo Park. She had a cat, a parakeet, records by Billie Holiday and pictures on the wall of plump and well-fed Indian yogis. She was close to forty and had lived hard. Sex for money had not been out of the question. Now she was in AA, most of the time. Like a lot of people in town she was trying to cultivate her spiritual side, treating it in that particularly American approach, as though she had decided finally to take up the piano after putting it off all her life.

“With steady practice,” she told him, “proficiency is assured.”

Only, in her case, it was her body and mind that were the vessel, the instrument for the music, the divine music.

“Just don’t renounce sex on your spiritual path,” he kidded her. “That’s where people get hung up.”

“Sex is my path,” she laughed.

It was her body that propelled him. She was a little taller than he, and lean from her daily regimen of treadmills and barbells. She had well-defined biceps, small breasts and narrow hips. Her hair was blood orange and her facial features taut and angular. She had pretty green eyes that shone under graceful brows like starboard lights in a harbor beneath a sky on fire at dusk. Looking at her one might think she was too thin, that she hadn’t enough to eat. Giambone was usually attracted to more fleshy types. But he found it hard to ignore Delilah’s overt sensuality. Her spiritual ambitions notwithstanding, she had yet to cut sex out of her diet, unlike dairy products and meat. She had a healthy, if flaky, appreciation of sexuality as the Divine Impulse. Properly channeled it would bring the practitioner into close proximity of God’s magisterial beauty (which God was open to conjecture). Sex had the potential for transforming the gross and mechanical actions of the body into a sanctified experience, one in which the higher chakras were blown right open. However, it was necessary, of course, for one to be properly attuned to the body’s cosmic rhythms; and to be coupled with the right partner. If whips and chains were necessary for the coupling, for calibrating the body and mind to a proper accommodation of the Divine, this was perfectly okay. Role-playing, dirty talk, lingerie, prosthetic devices, all of these were permissible in the service of Delilah’s dogged attempts to achieve a peak spiritual experience.

“The Great Goddess gave us our bodies with the capacity for pleasure,” she told Giambone that first night in the restaurant. “Why would we refuse her most precious gift for achieving a heightened communion with her?”

Giambone really needed no persuading.

“I’m just relieved you’re not a Vestal Virgin,” he told her. “Some people take the celibacy/God paradigm a little too far.” He was happy no longer to be a Plutoid.

She smiled. The tight-fitting, low-cut, sleeveless black dress she wore that night did most of the talking. It was all Giambone could do to keep from reaching in and massaging her nipples, announcing themselves as they did with such numinous clarity, poking like twin Ararats at the shiny fabric squeezing against them.

He only had to wait a few hours more, when he parked his Dodge Ram pickup truck on Parkman Street in front of Delilah’s tidy, low-rent bungalow. He slid next to her along the seat of the cab. As soon as their lips touched his hand found its way to her breasts. With little discussion and a short amount of time, Delilah was escorting Giambone to the inner sanctum of her bedroom, where she lay prostrate before her makeshift altar to Baba Tunda Olay, and let Giambone gently prod her to a higher awareness of the Great Goddess’ beatific attributes. Three weeks later he told her he loved her, just before he learned her name wasn’t Delilah.

It was Louise. Delilah was her stage name, the one she adopted when she’d danced topless at Billy’s Clown Room, an old-time neighborhood bar and strip joint in East Hollywood. The girls at Billy’s shook and shimmied along an elevated runway behind a circular bar. They nuzzled their dookie slots up to the patrons’ beer mugs, coaxing the phlegmatic clientele as best they could to stuff a dollar bill or two in their coochie coo G-strings. Louise liked the name Delilah. It had Scriptural connotations; it fit in with her recently acquired and earnest vocation for gobbling up the great works of sacred literature. It also went well with the new social security number she had managed to expropriate, a small investment designed to erase her past and keep the IRS and Parking Violations Bureau off her trail. Marrying and taking Giambone’s last name would further deaden the scent for the dogs of the law. And from the start, Delilah was determined to marry Giambone. She was no girl anymore and tired of hustling. An opportunity like Giambone didn’t happen along but once, if ever. It helped that she liked him and thought he was cute.

  Giambone was certain that now he was finally with the true love of his life. No longer would he need to pursue his erratic quest for a peaceful home, a calm spirit. His mind had always been plagued with every manner of self-doubt, long festering complaints, a severe sense of the world’s injustice, and an unflagging conviction of his own inability to be loved, all of which he compensated for by a blustery and pervasive braggadocio.

None of this is to say that he was without deep feeling. Giambone’s eyes watered at mawkish trifles and any sincere expression of affection that was shown to him. All of his thundering appeals to his own omniscience were flooded and washed away at the simplest declaration of love or affection. At these moments witnesses could observe a physical transformation. His eyes would tear. His scowl would disappear and a great smile would reach to the corners of his soft, fleshy face. He would shake his head from side to side, as if in disbelief, as though it were inconceivable that such generosity and kindness were being directed at him. The skin of his face grew a pale crimson, its texture mellowed. A staccato giggle tripped lightly from the back of his throat. His shoulders buckled, released from their constant vigilance against the world’s unpredictable blows. All belligerence dissipated. He became a feminine creature in the Taoist sense, soft and receptive and trusting and demonstrative of the cuddling emotion that was incited by someone’s kind words. This was the way he preferred to live. This is what he sought in his heart at all times, to duplicate again and again the feeling of a huge, buoyant and magnanimous affection, and to surround himself with the ones from whom he could most expect it in return. His entire venture with the Plutoids was undertaken for this very reason, and it was one of the great disappointments of his life when it became evident that they were just as human as all others, and they could not sustain a love that was unceasing in its regard for him.

Delilah was the incipient spark. She was the new foundation of his new life. With her he would make a family, the source and embodiment of irrepressible and inexhaustible love. It was there and there alone that he harbored any hope of finding his home again, that unassailable place where one’s being is honored without strife or impediment. He was sweet and sopping in the center of his love for her. He was certain then that she, with her immersion in religion, her impulse to live a clean life, her athletic, graceful body which was entirely open to him, that it was she whom the fates had ordained to be the mother of his children and his beloved wife.

His reasoning was so much helped by his infatuation with Delilah’s physical attributes and the skill with which she brought him intense sensual pleasure. No woman had ever taken him so expertly into her mouth nor offered her vagina so free of inhibition. He was drunk on her, and the erections she inspired were more aggressively sprung and deliriously prolonged than any he had ever known. When he poured and emptied the liquid of himself into her, he felt as if he, the entire essence of his knowledge, feeling, and love, traveled inside her as well. He inhabited her, colonizing her soul with his. He felt himself grow into her, become her, a new life there inside her, and that is where he wished to stay, always inside her, his fluids lapping like the ocean tide upon the unslakeable strand of her womb.

Time had almost run out for Delilah, but the planets had aligned; inscrutable and ineffable forces had wrought this new chapter in the epic she called her life. She trusted Giambone. He was kind. He was attentive to her, if occasionally obstinate, or a little overbearing in that manner in which he believed he knew more and better. But beneath his domineering tendencies and the occasional way he ridiculed a thought or opinion she held, he was gentle and affectionate and she was convinced he was a good man who would love her. This was her opportunity to become new again, a fresh personality, a reformulated conscious identity with no reproachable past tethered to her. The process of death and rebirth was at work inside her, the Shiva and Shakti duality that spun around each individual in a succession of lives, an infinity of incarnations. It was an opportunity to redress the wrongs in her life, acknowledging them publicly and seeking forgiveness from the universe through one of its human agents. It was for this reason she committed herself to the difficult task of confiding in Giambone the events of her past that troubled her. They were not the things that were troubling as a shameful source of sin. Rather, they were actions not undertaken with the highest aspirations for the growth and development of her consciousness or that of the universe, for the two were inextricably connected.

Giambone had a moral character that was both quaint and contradictory. He found it troubling, for instance, that Delilah would have voluntarily chosen to show her body to a roomful of men.

“Especially Billy’s Clown Room,” he told her, making a sour face, as if he could smell the stale beer and the dried semen in the lavatory. “That place is full of losers. How could you stand that – the lunch pail crowd drooling in their cheap tequila?”

“Honey, it was easy.”

She was patient with him. He could be petulant but he was less volatile than other lovers she had made the mistake of telling.

“It was three things,” she told him. “Pretty good money; low self-esteem (I needed to be desired); and protection – no one was gonna hurt me at Billy’s. You know, we all make some bad choices, Tony. Don’t hold it against me.”

He liked to think that he had an open mind. He had been to strip joints himself in the past. But there was something distasteful, even repugnant about it when it concerned the woman he loved, even if all of it happened before he knew her. Having knowledge of her exhibitionist past was to imagine it. And imagining it, seeing Delilah actively inciting the lust of other men, bothered Giambone when it didn’t excite him, which it did every time they fucked. She knew what she was doing and he liked that. He was in love.

After a while, she thought she was in love, too. He was the eureka event of her life. To her it was a complete and unitary benefaction from the universe. She was an advocate of a belief that was current in human development movements peculiar to affluent capitalist societies.

“I am deserving to the universe’s good bounty,” she believed.

“If you suffer enough,” he answered with his own brand of insight, “after a time, like the weather, there comes relief. You’re my relief, babe.”

By observing what she felt to be inalienable laws of universal virtue – a concept open to wide interpretation – she was entitled to attract things like love, money, health and happiness. This attitude didn’t foster a strong desire to analyze too closely what seemed like a gift. It was a gift that she believed was a proprietary right. It was bestowed by a universal guardian and administrator of good fortune after tallying up her life’s work and the number of prosperity affirmations she had made each morning, just after she’d done her stretching exercises and lit a bouquet of incense. Adherents of this way of thinking, if pressed, would say that simply wanting something badly enough made a person sufficiently deserving of “attracting” it.

In the beginning it was hard for Delilah to discern the difference between loving Giambone and being seduced by the people, the family, with whom he was associated. It was not an uncommon confusion into which people fell when meeting him. Celebrity induces a kind of madness in those who stumble into its reflected light. It fits in with a primitive impulse to make and name gods, a human need to be enthralled only slightly lessened by the discoveries of science. Science makes a human feel not so much alone as inconsequential. But to feel the warm light of human greatness shine upon her makes her feel select, unique and significant, as though her private thoughts are being heard and acknowledged by a higher source. Delilah hungered for admiration. The eyes of men had usually filled the void. Now the source of that admiration would be the eyes of the world, and a select circle of exalted humans into which she would be admitted by the blood ties of the man whom she deserved.