Cardi B

            I woke up to find that sleep was still sleeping and I was awake and suspended in the foul swamp of stagnant. rotten spit inside of its closed toothless mouth. I had to use yoga to pry my way out from its cracked lips.

            On Friday morning three Dobie Gillis shows that I’d started downloading nine months ago but that had stalled at a very low percentage of completion, suddenly came through.

            I watched some videos from a new artist named Cardi B. She’s a surreally voluptuous former stripper, turned rapper with an uncensored hood vocabulary. One of her quotes is, “Don’t be a thirsty hoe, be a classy hoe.” My favourite of her songs that I’ve heard so far is “Cheap Ass Weave”: “The nerve of you bitches / I got no words for you bitches … I know how this go /Cheap shoes is okay, cheap dress is okay but cheap weave is a no … How can you talk about me when your weave is inside of the grave? It’s dead bitch … I am a masterpiece, you are a tragedy …You know that weave stink, that shit need a tic tac …” All of that is rapped with a high voiced Bronx accent. She kind of reminds me physically and vocally of a Black Rosie Perez.

            I didn’t really think of her as my type but when I took a siesta that afternoon I had an erotic dream about her. We were laying face down, facing each other and necking on the floor of a mall with the lights out, even though the mall was open and there were people around. She said something about dicks or sucking them.

            I watched one of the more predictable Alfred Hitchcock Hour teleplays. This one was about a woman named Helen who tells her lawyer, Paul, that she has been receiving death threats from a childhood friend named Dorothy who has become mentally ill. She’s received phone calls and a caustic letter with stationary from the studio of a photographer named Jack Terola. Paul goes to the studio and the photographer tells him that Dorothy threatened him too and defaced his wall and several photographs with red lipstick before leaving. Paul tracks Dorothy down and she is indeed not in a very healthy state of mind. For one thing she’s an alcoholic, but though she admits to hating Helen she insists that she never called her, and though she had called Jack Terola once she hasn’t tried to reach him in several years. At this point I realized that this story could not be remotely interesting unless there were some kind of split personality scenario going on. I thought it would be more intriguing if Helen and Dorothy were the same person but they didn’t that route. Paul receives a call from Dorothy saying she is going to make Helen pay. Dorothy goes to see Helen but Helen runs away. Later a woman enters Terola’s darkroom and shoots him, then Dorothy calls Paul and says that she has Helen captive at Helen’s place. When Paul and the cops show up bullets come flying through the apartment door. They hear Dorothy inside and Helen calling for help, but then Dorothy steps out of the elevator and they realize that Helen is a dual personality that also thinks she is Dorothy.