She parked halfway into a ditch behind most of the others and turned off her engine. There, she was stunned by loud music vibrating the windows, piercing her ears with its pollutants of action usurping meditation, and weltering in the hollows of her brain. She entered her hermitage whence all the noise originated. Inside all was being barraged in the cacophony of rap, hip hop, or some other artillery that she had neither knowledge of nor empty labels to place on that which she was adverse to know anything about. She looked on her surroundings with the consternation of one returning to charred and smoke filled ruins still in the grip of war.
Then her mood changed into something entirely different: moralistic loathing. She felt as an unwitting heterosexual man innocently defecating in a cubicle of a restroom in a shopping mall who is startled and appalled to see from that crevice interconnecting the adjacent cubicle to his own a hand one moment, a face the next, and then that hand again as it trespasses with fingers wiggling a "come to my stool and service me" gesture. For when the consternation had worn off the former whore and Victorian adulteress was repulsed by the world around her: repulsed by the nebulous clouds of smoke, the inebriating smells of beer so potent as to be tactile and viscous enough to be a liquid pouring into her lungs, this scene of teenage couples smooching and almost smooching as they got stoned in her living room, and how this generation was caught up in the same hungers making it no different from those which preceded it.
All compunction of her own interestingly varied if no more lascivious life than other earthlings vanished from all conscious thought. Even if she had latent ideas that Puritanical prudishness would be hypocritical, and even if she doubted having the moral authority to be the guardian of youth since, according to her there were no morals to guard, she intended to crash the party nonetheless.
The indignation she, an American homeowner, experienced at such intruders occupying and thereby desecrating "her" hallowed domain amalgamated with her Puritanical eagerness to excoriate all moral unregenerates. For she too was an American, that autocratic hybrid of conservative and liberal property owners, espousers, and defenders of ownership who wanted to dictate moral rules sententiously in accord with ownership agendas. As nature only had evolvement from viable elements, energy, accident, and chance into its structure a person with some financial means wanted to own and possess to be, and wanted the trespassers of her property arrested. She thought of this peculiar sense of ownership that flared within her; and although she would be amused by ruminations of its senselessness in the immediate future, now she judged it was time to be irate. It was time to act.
Disheveled angel on a loveseat: "Hello, you must be Mom." Beer bottle quaffer on a newly upholstered chair (repeating mockingly):"Hi Mom." Androgynous purple haired creature (disingenuous as a child waving at Mickey Mouse in Disneyland but directed at her, this polar bear with the stiff arms who had been mutilation at her inception, who trudged through the party): Merely waving.
The occupiers seemed to be everywhere. Some were rising from below or descending from above to stare at her from a staircase while a good many of the others were in the same room with her or waiting in the hall. As her house had myriad rooms, so she assumed, would be the amount of trespassers
Gabriele (to all): "Who or what the hell are you?" Angel (as if the question were directed to her alone): "I am an angel." Angel's partner on the loveseat: "Angel of the streets. That would be more like it."
He was using his fingers to comb through her disheveled hair— hair that combed or not was comely in youth— youths who were insouciant and free of financial worries, nonchalant to the shadow of their adulthood of entrapment that they were stepping into like a snare— shadows of ineluctable errors in the making of one's own family that for now were not their own. She imagined the angel" dirtying up" the back of her sofa with the hair fibers of her mop. Then she surmised the dirty invaders as a whole. They were getting high on more than the present moment. If they were still floating on a dispersed cloud of smoke they would soon be seeking to inhale more to keep themselves high until the inevitability of sleep would make them founder. If they had not already burnt a whole or spilled beer onto any of her furniture they would have surely done so had she kept her original plan of staying in New York City for the night. She loathed them for being the dirty ravagers of her home that they were but, wise to herself and the tricks therein, she knew that she loathed the occupiers more from the envy of their youth than for any carnal carnival that they had imposed upon her hermitage schemed together in the expectation of her absence.
Angel: "Okay, I'm a street angel." Laughter in the room to which Gabriele also laughed albeit begrudgingly. Thick lips: "Call me Mr. P. How do you do, Mother? Would you allow me to kiss your cheek?" More hysterical laughter. Was her role as the mommy storming the party something so farcical? Was she such a farce as a mother? If she were it was from the fact that her intelligence was greater than the role. This was what she told herself. She grabbed thick lips by one of his long ears and forced him to kneel. "Do you think I'd let an ugly dog like you slobber on me?" she blared. There was more hysterical laughter. The room itself seemed to scoff her pretension to motherhood within the sheer volume of its cacophonous and sneering laughter. Her obdurate eyes fell as solid boulders into his retina pools. Then suddenly, her cold eyes dismissed him as of having no more importance than any insect, and she brushed him aside.
Weren't they impertinent? If it had been directed toward anyone else she would have approved, but their impertinence to her was a contemptible act mocking the authority she had to dismiss them with. Their sedentary refusal to leave her immediately as she entered her domicile was a criminal action. "Party's over, party's over!" she screamed six times into random faces that were seated in a semicircle. But this only increased their laughter at the redundancies of the mad mommy. For a year now there had been her own repudiation of the residual smells of cocaine; briefly returning from the shop to find him lounging around in the house in his underwear; music slaughtering her contemplations; sitting languidly in meetings at the school to discuss his truancy and feeling as a broken drum, a defunct instrument that could not obtain change; his running away for days without her being able to fathom where he went; talks where, without propitiating, she admitted having not been there as much as the domestic sort, but cautioning him to secure his future by attending classes and studying as diligently as he was able to do; scoldings and beatings that were also to no avail; watching small but expensive items disappear from the home and telling herself that she meant to get rid of them anyhow; and now this.