Call Me Ishtar

by Rhoda Lerman

  I kissed her bleeding head in the reception room and handed the attendant my sad offering for burning. The woman, still crying, suggested I move from my neighborhood, where there are now many cars, too many for animals to deal with. She cried and handed me her card. She sells real estate. You don’t think there is an as yet undefined relationship there too, do you? That in this way she lists new houses first? When you live in the land of Ra and Dio, anything is possible. I feel somehow that I have sacrificed Green for what purpose I do not yet know. I am certain her death relates to my having been shaved.

  There is a Samsonian defeat in all of this and I can not blame it on Robert, as I wish to, who lay in his bed when I emerged from my Phisohex bath and laughed like a schoolboy at my girlish plump, neatly plucked naked triangle … my cooky, as my mother referred to my parts. I threatened to re-circumcise him with my regrowth as soon as I had regrowth. However, immediately that night something odd began to occur. I dare not ask the doctor. He will only shred me again with his barnyard laughter and his old razor blade. And I am not sure that it is something to dislike, this new condition. It is not to be belittled. I believe it is rather special and I tell you only so you can understand all of this. Rather than a stiff and whiskery regrowth, I am soft and downy on my cooky.

  I can’t go on about it.

  Which is why I shall return again and again to it.

  I have seen in dreams a raven jumped by a weasel. The raven was black and old and I think perhaps wise, the kind of raven one sees scudding across the full face of the moon. It pecked in a field of limestone boulders like frozen whale bones, pierced here and there with bits of sphagnum moss and spongy grasses. The weasel, thirsted, leaped from a white rock onto the raven’s back and the raven fought, whirling, screaming, but the weasel held. And then the raven with supernatural power took to his skies over the sea. There he wheeled and dived and wheeled again and again trying to shake off the weasel. The weasel held to the raven. Terrified or tired or satisfied, his grip loosened and the weasel plummeted to sea, feathers still sticking from his mouth.

  I might mention here that it is amazing what a simple change like this can do for one’s personality. Better than a nose job, of course. I feel so much more complete and complex, albeit rather giddy. I have refused this week, while I am healing, to go to the factory and Robert is upset but understanding. He is very gentle and fascinated with my new growth. He is too astonished to laugh or to tease me any longer. He seems to take a sort of wondrous pride in the down. He fluffs it with his Luckies breath while the cat, Blue, sits sphinxlike spread between us, watching, often taking little nips at Robert’s breath. I look also. We can only see the movement of the down under Robert’s breath but Blue, I believe, sees the breath as reality. Blue walked over the first evening of my down, sniffed and then rolled with his back across my belly and underbelly. He approved and accepted this change in me, which is nice. Although I shave very often under my arms now, almost savagely, nothing happens there. When I say to Robert in bad moments, “Once a queen, always a queen,” he responds, “With feathers.” It has become a litany between us. Robert is not the kind of man to tell other men about his personal life. No one will really ever know of course unless I so choose. But I will most likely never return to the gynecologist. I do not like gynecologists. I am sure they are all perverted and not even polymorphously so. They know only one place. I can not imagine sleeping with one. I have tried to and I can not.

  Which reminds me. I must take my son’s fangs, which I believe his gerbils have now spirited into their fetid cage in the kitchen, to the dentist for his examination. My son extracts long bloody fangs from his seven-year-old mouth. They are not his canine teeth, I have discovered. They are from different parts of his mouth. Rodent teeth, thumbnail long, which initiate a deep and grinding horror within me. He is losing his permanent teeth, speaking of odd choices of words, this genetic monster of mine whom I love so madly. I diligently gave him quarters for his lost teeth and he had always been convinced that I was the Tooth Fairy. I will not pay him for the permanent teeth. He has also thought for years that I had a tail and laid eggs.

  I believe knowing about my feathers will also upset him and draw out more of the precious teeth. His father will buy him new ones. The feathers can be destructive, I imagine. But they can also give me power.

  It is not my wish nor has it ever been to use my sex to bargain with Robert, nor my feathers. But it is a position, this bargaining, into which I am forced. The feathers give me a new wedge. Robert, after all, at one time in his life, rose every morning, bowed and thanked God for not making him a woman. Now, let him be grateful then to me, for without me, I am beginning to realize, he is not a man. This is a new and interesting idea and I have to consider it. Robert thinks that money is stored up energy against the time when he is weak. I wonder if he really has stored up energy against his weakness for me. It is not energy he stores; it is hate. I wonder if I could send him plummeting into the sea with feathers in his mouth as I go scudding across the moon. I’m being totally irresponsible. I need to ask him to put money into my once and again overdrawn account. I must do something today about my teeth and my son’s teeth and as I plan my day, two orange cats sharpen their claws against the sides of my suede sofa, which is granting the cats a new energy by its very richness. In some respects Robert is right. He is correct about taking care of things and holding back rot and decay. But I must in the future sort out very carefully those things about which he is incorrect. Now that I have feathers, I seem, untangled, to see things more clearly.

  “See and hear the Demons at the Inferno. The Inferno, where it all hangs out. The Demons. The Inferno. Where it all hangs out.”

  The owner of the Inferno was crippled. He wore red, blue and white horse racing plaids over his shortened leg and his normal leg. His shoes were brown and white gum soled saddles, mismated for the ungrown foot. Ishtar drank tonic water in his office high above the floor of his vast warehouse dance hall. A perfect Russian wolfhound licked her ankles.

  Robert was in New York, conversing with a minor, but heavily invested, recording company interested in the first album. The owner of the Inferno had called Ishtar with a quaver of hysteria in his voice. “Your band,” the owner had complained, “your band’s fighting me every step. They cut short on the sets; they stretch the breaks to forty minutes sometimes instead of the twenty. Don’t play requests. The kids are talking about them. Bad ass guys. Listen, don’t get me wrong. I got twenty off-duty cops in the lot parking cars and bikes. I’m almost up to two thousand kids on weekdays, which is terrific. Like your husband says, they draw. But they still gotta have some stepping on. They gotta work with club owners no matter how big they are. And they’re bad ass. The kids turn off and then you don’t get record sales up here.”

  The boys had played four nights and had a week and a half to go on contract. Ishtar had flown unhappily to Buffalo that evening. Annoyed at the soot on the snowy face of the city, she wore a black silk dress cut low under the arms so the white sides of her breasts were displayed, depending on how she sat. She sat carefully in his paneled room. “So talk with them, huh? I don’t want any more screwups. Right now, they’re on break and they’re ten, nope eleven minutes into the set time. Probably getting laid, uh, excuse me, in the dressing room. The kids know and they’re sore.”

  Ishtar sat coolly listening. Then the owner led her, bobbing on his gumsoles, to the projection room. Jimmy, her projectionist, sat with his knees to his chin on a high stool, his face gargoyle lit from below. Jimmy dipped his head from the light controls. He was choosing cuts of meat with his spotlight, concentrating, touching wantonly like a mad butcher the torsos of three jerking girls dancing to the canned music. The owner pointed to them. Their faces were swollen also in the sharp lights of his spots, their hair Pythian puffed, their eyes hawklike, unfocused, turned in on the bird bones behind their makeup masks. Ishtar sorrowed for their emptiness.

  “You see,” she whispered to th
e wolfhound who understood her and the owner who did not, “they hope. They wait for the music to make something happen, they wait for something to fill the spaces between their eyes. They come hungrily each night, thinking it will happen from the music.”

  “Hey, Ishtar, they’re waiting for the Demons because they dropped three clams at the door.”

  Ishtar chose to ignore the owner. People had always thronged to stages and altars and threshing floors because they were assured of something happening when Ishtar was in charge. “And these sad children,” she spoke silently now to the wolfhound, “the girls in their cheap bellbottoms, their frayed acetate ruffles, their new shoes turned at the heels already, soles warped from the salted snow … see? And see the boys with their legs like matchsticks and Trues wrapped in the half-sleeves of their T-shirts, see them? Ungenerous bony-assed boys in lightweight pants. Ah, out of the swamps they come, impure, fireflies, to hear the Demons because the Demons are out of the same swamp, you understand, with the same rotting chickens and Fords in their backyards and the same good mothers who iron their shirts and cook their sauces at sunrise.” The wolfhound responded to Ishtar’s wisdom by licking her ankles, his tongue rasping on the stockings. Ishtar’s blood danced to the movement of the tongue.

  Below in the sea of children, the heat held light pillars of cloudy blues and greens. The pillars rose between the ceiling and the floor. Acrid stenches of pizza, garlic, beer, urine, cigarettes hung longer and closer in the heat. Behind her counter, a pizza waitress wiped the back of her neck with a towel and repinned an elaborate french curl. A redheaded girl, standing far from the stage, alone and ignored, waved a large balloon magic-marked hey twentymiles! Fronds of Genesee beer signs and plastic clovers festooned the I beams. The faces of Marilyn Monroe and W. C. Fields, like unholy parents, moved, blown-up across the walls while Popeye grinned from the ceiling. A multi-faceted fixture rotated, casting traces of light in widening pools on the shoulders and heads of the children. It would have been, Ishtar sighed, a magnificent place for a mass initiation rite.

  “I got eighteen, nineteen hundred at three a head.” Someone popped the redheaded girl’s balloon and she cried into her hands. The crowd hid her.

  Ishtar frowned. The owner hit Jimmy on the shoulder and sent him to the dressing room to find the band. “Ever see this light show work?” he asked Ishtar as he poured Three-in-One oil into a basin below the projector and sprinkled in powdered paints of bright colors. “Really simple.”

  “Good effect,” she replied, watching carefully. There was so much to learn, having worked only with the fire of heaven, the auroras and lightnings.

  “That’s a classy bunch a groupies your guys have. Those ones only come for the big groups. I can always tell a group’s going somewhere when they show. Can’t see them from here.” He leaned against the wall to relieve his good leg. “That’s why I took the bother to call.

  Otherwise I’d fire the bunch a them for breach a contract. Nino, that Twentymiles …”

  “Twentymiles?”

  “Ventimiglia. The girls call him that because, well, he’s well-endowed.”

  “Oh.”

  “And if I were you, I’d keep Mack from him. I think Mack’s got the hots for him. That Mack. You know what he does when I tell him something? Walks away from me. Just walks away.” The owner shifted his legs and waited for Ishtar’s agreement.

  “Is your leg a birth defect or an accident?” she asked, not completely kindly. The owner bent to pat the wolfhound’s head as his face grew brilliant over the horse plaids. “Birth.”

  “I’m terribly sorry,” she answered, now sincerely.

  There were long dog hairs on her black dress. There were long dog hairs on his plaid pants. She wanted to be rid of him.

  “Yeah, well.” He brushed and picked at himself. “I gotta go turn up the heat. They drink more in the heat.” He commanded the dog to remain in the projection room. “Sure appreciate you coming up. Management’s real important in this racket.”

  “I don’t dispute you, baby.”

  They shook hands solemnly.

  7

  I MYSELF HAVE A GREAT CURIOSITY, RECENTLY ACQUIRED, TO BE eaten. By a man with a mustache. You understand why I have not taken advantage of the flesh in the rock and roll band. I am terrified of social disease. Frankly, I am grateful that my terrible pubic itches were fleas rather than anything social. I will soon need advice. Being bright does not help me. For when I ask questions that are purely and honestly naïve, I am not taken seriously. I still do not know whether social diseases can be transmitted from kissing. Perhaps from groupie to boy to pen to contract. Could it be, I would ask if I knew someone who would answer, that if Mack has relations with the groupies in the usual attitudes he tells me the seven assume with five or more in a small bed in Painted Post and then Mack kisses me in Horseheads …? Isn’t it odd that the lower classes who are most likely to carry diseases continue to assume all these breeding variations while the upper classes who are most clean rarely vary their position. Things are changing though. I am told. Perhaps I will be involved in the change.

  My gynecologist is the past president of the Jewish Community Center and condemns me because I joined the European Health Spa instead of the Center Pool. If he condemns me for that disloyalty, I can not ask him about other disloyalties. The groupies complain to me that the seven Demons wish only to assume odd positions and there is something I do not feel free to describe that is an act which is very distasteful to the groupies and they complain constantly to me about it in my position as mother. Promise as the boys do, they continue to perform in this abominable manner. It could be therefore, that this cross polident pollination from pistil to stamen to stem as it were …? No, nor from toilet seats, my mother always said.

  I can not ask Robert either. He, I suppose, knows the answers.

  Recently we traveled on a vividly hot day to an afternoon concert at a small agricultural college in Morrisville. Robert was driving. He had told me to sit in the back and write down the names of songs as Mack recited them to me. Name, artist, studio, time. The list would be submitted to a Scranton disc jockey preparatory to our playing Scranton. We stopped for a Dairy Queen. He sucked the breasts of the Goddess, it was said of Marduk, and I watched nostalgically as Mack licked the curl on the top of his pistachio Dairy Queen. Robert ordered a butterscotch sundae. I, nothing. Mack offered me his cone. Robert turned and said, “I wouldn’t eat that if you knew where his tongue had been.” Mack laughed. Obviously Robert knew something. He did not know that Mack and I were holding hands under my notebook. I can’t ask Robert. Mack has a mustache.

  I often think that another five minutes in Mack’s red Corvette in the rain in the Savarin Thruway parking lot with the lights of midnight trucks bleeding across the silvery pavement, or in my bedroom listening to tapes of disc jockeys talking about the Demon’s music, or lying on the red plastic couch in the rehearsal hall which was once a chicken coop behind Mack’s house on moist summer nights writing words for the songs he plays shirtless, on the upright piano, I often think only five minutes more and we would stop looking so hungrily at each other and finally make love.

  But nothing. When I ask him why not, he will answer, “I’m content.” His Adam’s apple chokes him and his eyes are ravaged and his lips turn white and he is content. So. I do not want to push him too far for then I would totally terrify him. He may be waiting for me, or he may be simply holding me at bay to use my power over Robert to his advantage. I am not undesirable and he has whispered to me in all of those perfect above-mentioned places and more at other times, on trips into New York and Chicago where we are alone for uncounted hours, that he wants me. I say nothing.

  After all, I am there.

  He told me once over a pair of runny English muffins at the Poughkeepsie Savarin that he was afraid of me, physically. I laughed. Robert trusts Mack more than he trusts the others and so I am to drive with Mack only. That is why we are alone so much on week nights. Weekend
s, Robert travels with them. I am growing more certain of this power I have every day now. Mack recognized it early. That is why he can not ball me, as he says. I am beginning to recognize it also. It is a dreadful thing, this power, something like a magnetic box inside me that draws men, women, children, teenage boys, animals and teeth towards me. Robert calls it charm. I know better. I often know when it is charm only, for there are deposits of lipstick on my teeth from the particular smile. Other times, I do not know what it is that trips the magnetism. If I did know, and could control the power and use it to my advantage, I would be very happy. Recently returning from New York City, where I had taken tapes to Atlantic records and was offered by the person next to me on the airplane a newspaper, I used, unwittingly, my power. I had only noticed his pink shirt sleeve as he read and I watched the black shapes of night moving across the moon. I was very tired. “No, thank you,” I answered kindly. “I am so tired that reading would make me cross-eyed.” He folded his paper, gathered his effects, and as I looked up to see why he was thus leaving in mid-flight, I saw that he was already cross-eyed. He changed his seat. I had hurt him. I do not know why I even mentioned cross-eyes. It may be unintentionally in some way, that is my power which draws my son to pull out his permanent teeth and leads me to harm people.