Undressing The Spice Mistress: The Order Of The Gothic Soul

Floating in the mist and shadow is Mara Vittori, a spice dealer originally from Romania where she once taught violin in a conservatory for girls. She speaks four languages.

In a drafty basement in the business district, inside this old-style Gothic village on Old Route 66, hawthorn and whitehorn crowns hang from doors and windows. The tables are adorned with thrift store bric-a-brac; ceramic Gothic Angeliques, pewter gargoyles, onyx-covered bats, oil lamps, and pop-sickle-stick crosses.

No other place has the same capacity to sharpen the senses as the seductive, dark corners in this simple, drafty basement reserved exclusively to the Goths. Their establishment is named The Black Tear, that name derived from the single black tear the Goths have painted on their faces. The Goths and their makeup are not evil, just misunderstood. Their gatherings are friendly and nonthreatening. Don't judge a book by its cover. Look at your neighbor and say "I'm glad you're here."

Makeup is an important part of our American life as well as that of international cultures. Whatever the thickness of the foundation is psychology in the face of constant invasions.

The anti-feminist geisha industry of Japan depends largely upon makeup as do the Parisian mimes. So did the classic KISS stage of rock 'n roll and the expensive, misappropriated aisles of Tammy Faye Bakker Christianity.

The Black Tear is a meeting place for modern-day lesbians, feminists, paganists, and preservationists with an interest in the resurgence of antiquity. Their single black tear conveys the impression of the local feminist/lesbian group is bent on the environmental impact and preservation of the bat, writing erotic, neck-sucking poetry, reading Anne Rice novels, and playing and listening to punk metal music.

Some of them are bashful. Some of them are quite outspoken. They have names like Adelphia, Angelique, Ventura, Gwyneth, and Cameo. Girl velvets they are, Gothic lesbians with smooth skin and beautiful dark hair, dyed that way if it is not natural.

The Goth culture is seductive. Their primary focus is necking with each other. It is a romance with the kiss-cum-bite as it is affectionately named. It is their signature neck kiss which leaves a faint patch scuffed with the love bite.

Ancient love is frankly sexual. Sexual satisfaction plays a role in developing the Goths. For some of these girl velvets, they are breaking through into the consciousness of their repressed sexuality or sexual guilt. For others, they want to fuck the heroine in the "penny-dreadful," otherwise known as the Gothic vampire novel.

The bookstore sold out the novel and the band played on. If the bookstore wouldn't have sold out the novel, the band would have still played on. The novel is "Merrick," Anne Rice's new installment in her blood-sucker series. The band is Goth Velvet.

Rice's vampiric tale of seduction and the Mayfair witches set in New Orleans, with the return of Lestat, Louis, and Claudia is immune of course from old blood, and enjoying bestsellerdom.

The air is three kinds of coolness, wafting with the spicy scent of kahili ginger. "You are reading me," the newcomer at The Black Tear tells Mara, "like a spicy novel."

Mara just got back from ginger camp in Hawaii where she has picked kahili ginger in the Kipahula Valley where environmentalists have restored the forest with ginger that Mara has scored from her spice market contacts in the Himalayas last year.

"My writing conferences are often about how my clients don't think they are progressing fast enough. You are advancing very fast," the new woman says when Mara wastes no time in initiating her with the kiss-cum-bite. The woman feels her heart throbbing in her neck where Mara is sucking tenderly the flesh that sustains the Gothic lifestyle. "Must you stop?" the woman asks, lifting her skirt, guiding Mara's hand underneath, prepared to indulge in a full-fledged affair right here where they stand in the coolest of three kinds of cool. "Touch it."

A charming and desirable area it is, Mara pets her, but she has to take off her gloves to do it, glad to have company this early on. Seems to Mara that this woman hasn't been petted in awhile. Surely, it is the very way the woman says the lyric sentence that gives her away. "Smuggle a message to the countess. Hide it down there in the bale of wool."

"I'd like to suck the very life out of you," Mara whispers, smuggling a message to the "countess," cunt and countess one in the same, making use of a full Gothic vocabulary. Then Mara sees cat-eye flashes of emerald green like Cleopatra's Egyptian cats in the woman's eyes, then they burst with pure yellow like a Siberian wolf's, then they glow red with piercing intensity like a feral cat with attitude hybridized with a winged, Gothic gargoyle. Then comes the eyes Mara has been waiting for, the blue bedroom animal eyes, created from the color-changing light ball from Czechoslovakia, surmounted by three antique-pewter gargoyles. In Mediterranean countries, those with blue eyes were feared as vampires, because they were different.

The sticky, liquid cobweb hanging on the lacy edge of the woman's panties inspires Mara to go down in an assuming knee-numbing squat. The woman takes a shoe-size step forward toward Mara and staggers. "I need---to---straddle something," the woman gasps. "Turn the page!"

The self-help living and the novel fictitious are not strangers here. Many times, Mara has seen literary agents and Gothic writers and their paid ghosts exit this establishment to go to the graves after midnight with their chosen candle power, searching for the cryptic names on the stones. It is as simple as pitching The End page in the coolest of three kinds of cool for the finale exit until the next installment in the series. The inscriptions on this literary group of Goth's marble-streaked faces are poetic and fondly etched like the monuments, marking the private skeleton closets of the cast of characters.

Mara loves playing mistress of the spices to the erotic, predatory individuals who call attention to the neck and the uplifted erotic breast bound by different measures of cleavage. Lovingly, she hands out red roses to those who come through the door. The one thing about Mara is that she dislikes celibacy. "There is no nunnery here, but many Sisters," she says, but strictly calls for sexual abstinence for The Order Of The Gothic Soul during the daylight hours.

The vampiric connotation of this erotic tryst is of heirloom quality and will be chronicled in hardback on archival paper. The dust jacket, although there is no dust, will be printed for promotional purposes in black with silver intaglio, raised surface. Mara's dustless table pepper is 34-mesh and she removes the dust after grinding, so it doesn't collect inside the pepper shaker. The coarseness of pepper is determined by its "mesh." This dustless pepper is a big seller with the local restaurants.

Undressing the spice mistress as told by the agent just in case there is an interview, is "castles and mortars, pestles and pillars." The novel begins, "When Mara was a little girl in Romania, imagination and enterprise came into play where she balanced a long, sturdy pestle across a mortar for a seesaw. She went to Bulgaria to bag rose blossoms at the crack of dawn, before the sun evaporated their oils to make attar of rose for the perfume makers in France. Schoolchildren filled the seasonal labor shortages and gathered 80 percent of the harvest along the southern wall of the Balkans in the Valley of the Roses.

Starting with unlacing those curvy lace-up boots with a total of 48 eyelets that Mara wears in sacred raiment, the agent loosens the strings. "No strings attached," she says, making it perfectly clear she doesn't want to be exclusive to Mara.

"As sweet as you say it though, so is the nutmeg sweet whose seed is obtained from a peach-like evergreen. As sweet as you say it though, I've not known too many who can eat just one peach-like thing," Mara, whose scent is her signature, tells the agent. "I am so waiting for you beneath," Mara pants. She is hot enough to incinerate a castle. There is a touch of drama and Mara knows she has to hang on like the sawtooth picture hangars and not let go of everything at once. "Well straddle me! Do something! Anything!........................................................."