JIMMY VARGAS...REQUIEM FOR MY SHADOW BRIDE...NORTH BEACH HUCKSTER

       SAN FRANCISCO… last decade of the 20th Century.

       Nowsville.

I’m chain-dragging my past forward with me as an eternal side-windering’ drinkin’ compadre.

My beat noir is now North Beach, Broadway.  

Why haven’t I returned to the glittering graveyard that was the Hollywood of my past life?

Well, the L.A. that I used to haunt and hustle of fifty years since, no longer spins its’ allure over me.

L.A. is all xeroxed insouciance and shamour, a dolled up, cosmeticised death...

It ain’t my neighbourhood no more.

So I’ve shifted up a couple of degrees north for a more gothicised clime: San Francisco.

It’s also the Bay City where that perfume ether of that Shadow Bride of mine, for whom I still wait, is the

strongest in this present life.

And I sense she dangles a little bit of her veil here, her marble skin sculptured in the fog swirl, amplified by the dolant fragrance

of Lily of the Valley parfum.

© JIMMY VARGAS 2000 / 2011

From his multimedia dvd / E-Book “MY SHADOW BRIDE"

Photo: Elfes / Vargas

JIMMY VARGAS..."REQUIEM FOR MY SHADOW BRIDE"...LURE OF THE FORTIES SIREN

All the while she stalked and serenaded me with a phantom torch tune that I’d coined so long ago, honey lamenting the lachrymorose riff of my torch hymn ‘The Girl You Left Behind’ and she claimed it as hers by the satanique shimmer of my black stockings, lily fragrance and sorceress’ candles .

And I held on to that song like a lost lover’s memento, a scapula en-knotted, giving me holy water and hope but chokin’ me also.

She, this Shadow Bride, would usher forth on the chain-draggin’ melodies that cranked out of a trashcan jukebox, inveiglin’ me thru the gaseous whirly colours, into my neon haven.

And there she took on the doppelganger images of swing sisters and dead Hollywood sirenes… Lupe Vélez, Nita Naldi and Rita Hayworth, femme fatales and Black Dahlia doppelgangers, all women to whose heels I had once paid penance.

She flitted thru broken cabarets that I too haunted, and her hell raven curves would curse, peeka-booin' out of the slits of Chanel A-line skirts, her garter-belt sling shotting sexual innuendo, with her orbs materialising out of the diamond cat eyes from the back of her black- seamed Schiaparelli stockings, hypnotise hissin' me a route 666 to my yet unrealized hell...

© JIMMY VARGAS 2000 / 2011

From his multimedia dvd / E-Book 
“MY SHADOW BRIDE

Photo: Czerny / Vargas

JIMMY VARGAS "REQUIEM FOR MY SHADOW BRIDE"...LURE OF THE FORTIES SIREN

Psycho swangin’ through charity dump stores and flea joints for my  be-warped fix of bop 78’s and Hollywood fetish and cheese- cake pulps: Cabaret, Black Stocking, Wink and Whisper, snappin' em up all for a quarter each.

Creched tween the pages of ‘Black Stocking’ was a holy Voto of my Shadow Bride, in forties serge hard chic, a holy harlot in a temple brothel. The Virgin Mary a melancholic blue seraphim behind her.

  My Bride’s fingers loeuvering open a red velvet veil,

  slashed in a vaginal curse. 

  

Three flamed black candles smoked before her,

 bowing to her dark majesty, her chapeaux veiled with

  three holy rings on its’ peak declaring the Gnostic trinity of the tease the torch and the noir. 

I crested it in my zoot pocket above my heart line as a talisman.On the way out, I scooped up for an extra dollar a Zippo lighter that yielded tricks in its flint.

The Zippo was a gun, a salute, a connexion to a ritual, my torch as I stumbled thru those first three decades in spirit dyslexia.

And when I flicked my torch, that Shadow Bride, ushered forth, shimmerin’ cobra-hipped on its ether 

 fragrance of lily of the valley perfume and cordite. 

© JIMMY VARGAS 2000 / 2011

From his multimedia dvd / E-Book “MY SHADOW BRIDE

Release date April 21 2011

Photo: Czerny / Vargas

JIMMY VARGAS "REQUIEM FOR MY SHADOW BRIDE"..LURE OF THE FORTIES SIREN

                                      1958–1992:

PART FOUR


IN defiance to the era of hippies and fagellahs into which I’d been flung, I pilfered mementoes from the maze veils of 40’s Americana… Anything to connect me to my unfinished life, boosting bottles of ‘Auerbach’s Million Dollar Hair Tonic’ quiffing back my black hair in tribute to the Roccoli zoot suiter I always knew I was.

Psycho swangin’ through charity dump stores and flea joints, of the skid row  for my bewarped fix of bop 78’s and Hollywood fetish and cheese- cake pulps, trying to get a glimpse of her.

© JIMMY VARGAS 2000 / 2011

    From his multimedia dvd / E-Book “MY SHADOW BRIDE

  Photo: Chrysler / Vargas

JIMMY VARGAS "REQUIEM FOR MY SHADOW BRIDE"...LURE OF THE FORTIES SIREN

 She was there at the crossroads of my last breath of my last life...And the first of what I call this ‘gimcrack’ one.

She, a selongacious beauty, narcotisin’ melancholy and her sex in my veins,

Her voice etched in my other consciousness, a honey hush whisper… 
“Wait for me Jimmy”.

A vamptress with sin satin talons, flarin’ above the coronade of 
her viper tresses,

Alurin’ me by her mystical  flamenco and a funereal lily parfum,

A beaut-evil nightmare.

Stokin’ this my fortease fetish.

Trying to reconnect me with the religiosity of a past life that I never got to complete.

I didn’t know whether she had conjured me or I 
had summoned her,

And for thirty years she stalked and haunted me 
in phantasmic reverie.

Never of the real, just an amorphic veil…

I call her my Shadow Bride.

© JIMMY VARGAS 2000 / 2011

From his multimedia dvd / E-Book 
“REQUIEM FOR MY SHADOW BRIDE"

Photo: Torren / Vargas