I'm Lt. Joe Leaphorn, Navaho detective.

I'm visiting San Francisco on business. But in the course of the investigation, I must stay as a guest in the Victorian house where a witch-coven meets. Compost Coven, they call it.

Yeah, I'm the guest of witches. Good thing Chee's not here!

It's a strange place, as strange as the name. "You name yourselves after garbage?" I ask. "Not exactly" says a witch. "We do recycle, but compost literally means 'putting things together.' To see what ferments. That's what we do."

True. They hold a party, and wildly different people have gathered in the house and yard... mostly out in the back yard now. I stare down from the window, disoriented by the sheer variety of colors and sizes and shapes and clothes. And sexes. They're like dream-people, who don't quite make sense--I can't read them.

A little overwhelmed, I wander into the kitchen--and get a shock. Three women--the hostess and a friend of hers and a small teenage girl--are spooning ice cream into each other's mouths, and french kissing, sliding half-melted ice cream from tongue to tongue, melding flavors.

Despite myself, I'm turned on. I want to join them! But they ignore me. I'm a stranger, a man, a Navaho. I shouldn't anyway--I have food allergies, and that ice cream'd probably make me sick.

But it tears at me--they look so sensual...

NOTES IN THE MORNING

• Witch house = Christians aren't the only people infected with wiccaphobia. Traditional Navahos dreaded witches and sought to hunt them out--though not burn them at the stake! Gotta give the Christians credit for their holocaust (="to burn all"). Anyway... Tony Hillerman's detective-hero Joe Leaphorn isn't a Navaho traditionalist, he doesn't fear ghosts and witches. Or so he says. Well, here's the acid test. He has to be the guest of a whole coven! Of course they're not quite like the Navaho conception of witches. Or anyone else's.
• Compost Coven = a real San Francisco coven I have friends in.
• Food allergies = literal! I have EI: so sensitive to many foods, pollens, and chemicals that it severely limits my social life.
• Girls kissing = SF's Roxie Theater is showing a film on lesbian safe-sex clubs; their ad showed a sexy kiss rather like this.

The basic dilemma of environmental illness (EI) is "I want that, but can't tolerate it." A lot of us, including me, twist this into "I must not really want it" or desperately assert "I truly want this, so it won't hurt me." Both are false. I wasted years in therapy looking for "resistance" that wasn't there. We EI victims often bargain with our illness--"Just a little ice cream/sex/love now and I'll be careful all week," denying the cumulative, unpredictable nature of stress. Tonight, for example, I ate avocadoes and tried a new vegetable juice. Avocado's on my suspect list; the juice is unknown. I woke up ill. From which one? If I'd tried just one new food, I'd have another clue toward healing myself--been a cautious, methodical detective like Joe Leaphorn.

But nnnnnooooo....

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