Live From Golgotha

by Gore Vidal

  40 Gore Vidal

  "I know the story." She cut Saint short. "There is no death. It is all in the mind." She gave a loud belch; turned pink with embarrassment. "Oh, dear. Forgive me. The Welsh rarebit is repeating."

  "I had not finished," said Saint mildly. "Let me tell you His own words to me on the fi-eeway. Although a ghost. He looked just as He did in life except for a certain tendency to let the light shine through Him. 'How,' He asked me, 'can I, at this weight, be a convincing Holy Ghost.>' Well, I took the bull by the horns and said, 'Look, there's been talk of splitting you up into three parts—dad, son, ghost. Now if you were to be in the three sections . . .' "

  The lady gave a terrible cry. "I hate this! I'm nauseated. I'm nauseous, too. Three parts ..."

  "Of gin to one of Cointreau. You've told me twice now. Anyway, / told Jesus, straight fi-om the shoulder, that although this new doctrine was only on the drawing board, for His own peace of mind He could still go off to Gaza to this fat farm, run by an old pal of mine from Mossad, Ben-Hur. Remember him? How he beat that Roman fag in the chariot race by cheating.^ Well, he's now in the fat-farm business and, get this! Health food, too. Ben swears that a gram of locusts and goat-shit a day ..."

  The lady gave an eldritch scream. "My card," she added, opening her reticule and withdrawing what is known in TV-land as a calling card, which Saint took just as she vanished with the mournful words, "Oh, my head!"

  "I'll bet she has the mother of all hangovers. Cointreau with gin is a killer."

  "What's her name.>" Silas was moderately interested.

  "Mary Baker Eddy," Saint read from the card. "She's pastor of the Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, wherever that is."

  "Spain," said Silas who had traveled quite a lot. "Is this the same Christ as ours?"

  "I doubt it. But I do think we're in for a lot of copyright infringements."

  Then Paul put her name in the Holy Rolodex. As he used to say, you never know who's got the money. "It's tough trying to hang on to a trademark. James even went so far as to hire this smart Jew lawyer in Rome who specializes in copyright cases, but so far all he's been able to do is collect a large fee every quarter. James is a schmuck because the problem is not how do you copyright the word Christ, which you can't, but the cross as logo, which you can. Of course Pauline Christianity might be easier to copyright but"— Saint whinnied happily—"that would be sacrilege, wouldn't it.>"

  Silas and I then jumped him, tore off his tunic, and burned it by the Ferris wheel. Then we dumped the howling Saint into a nearby river.

  Thus it was that we established the First Pauline Church at Philippi, in the presence of Mary Baker Eddy of Boston, Spain.

  then the Corinthians are dance-mad. On our first trip we stayed for eighteen months, setting up a number of churches, granting fi-anchises for the logo, and so on.

  All in all, those months in Corinth were the high point of my life as a developing saint. Certainly Saint was in great form. He was now writing circular letters to our churches, epistles chock-full of recipes, jokes, hints on good grooming and interior decoration and, naturally, horoscopes.

  As Saint was dyslexic, he couldn't write much more than a name for the Holy Rolodex but he could dictate faster than anyone I've ever known. Of course he had a short attention span, which is why he seldom finished any of the letters. I don't give away any great secret when I say that I wrote maybe half of the letters Saint signed. I was particularly good at the fear-and-trembling stuff. Of course the basic bad news and bad-mouthing of just about everybody came ft-om Saint himself, as he danced around our hotel suite in downtown Corinth. ...

  I must break off here, as the future is breaking in on us again. Yesterday, after a batch of baptisms, I went to take some steam at the New Star Baths across from the proconsul's palace. Suddenly, a kibitzer appeared. He was very nervous and wore what I now know fi-om the television are glasses for seeing and an aid for hearing.

  "I can't believe it," he kept saying. We were in the tepidarium, never crowded at that hour. He was naked except for a folder that he held in one hand. "What have you got there.>" I asked.

  "New versions of Saint Paul's letters to Timothy. You . . . you . . . you must be Timothy." Like a shepherd, the man was quaking with awe while his hearing aid buzzed.

  44 Gore Vidal

  I took the letters from him. They had been set in type like the newspapers you see on television. I recognized some of our correspondence, frill of Saint's complaining and advising. Then I came across a very peculiar letter where Saint recalls his activities with Mossad and some of the early anti-Christian plots that he had been a party to, including setting fire to a certain well-known hostelry in downtown Jerusalem. "He never wrote me about this," I said. "And besides, that was long before he saw the light."

  "Are you sure. Saint Timothy.>" The man gave me the chills, even in the tepidarium.

  "I should know what he wrote me even when, sometimes, he didn't bother to mail it but had his letter copied and spread around the churches."

  "But our computer analysis, always correct, with a four percent margin of error, clearly shows that this was written by Saint Paul."

  Then the man was gone as quickly as he had arrived from nowhere. He will be back. I'm sure of that. Why.>

  46 Gore Vidal

  suspected that while he was off making tents and converts, Priscilla and I were acting like the world was going to end any minute and we had just the one more shot at the big O, the two of us. She called me Timaximus. There is something about the name Timothy that brings out the cuteness in people. I have named my boy Alexander. A good name, and unalterably butch.

  "I wish," said Priscilla, coming up for air in bed, "you would really let yourself go, and not hold back the way you do, ever fearful of the consequences of allowing your true nature to express itself." Naked, she sat down at her dressing table.

  I did not take this well. I had pounded her three times in one hour. I was a sweaty mess. Now as she was redoing her sex-sated face in the highly polished bronze faux e£iyptim mirror, she was trying to heat me up all over again by putting me down yet again. Some women are like that. Their only problem is that they don't know that there are a lot of other women just like them and most men have usually got their number—by heart, you might say.

  I cooled the overworked scarred tool in a faux egyptien basin and tidied up with a perfumed cloth. I must say I did learn a lot from Priscilla about cosmetics and unguents as well as the finer emotions.

  "Three times is my limit, cherie,'*'* I said. We often talked fauxgallique to each other. "In one heure that is," I added.

  "You speak now of the flesh fleshy." She was disdainful—she who had been munching for over an hour on my boyish flesh like a woman starving. "I meant something more spirituel. When two souls meet and mingle and merge as one." She bared her teeth in the mirror, not a pretty sight. The front tooth was cracked and obviously dead which is why the gum over it had turned black. This made her so self-

  conscious that in public she never opened her lips wide when she smiled, which gave her a come-hither rve-got-a-secret expression like the sphinx, which turned a lot of people on, including me.

  "Why don't you have that tooth pulled and get 2ifaux dentV' I was still a basically backwoods boy.

  'n^iensl^^ she exclaimed, fauxgalliqm for, I think, asshole. Then she shut her mouth and rouged her lips, drew on a pair of eyebrows, and became as lovely as a woman who'll never see forty hurde by again can be. Although Priscilla had accumulated a lot of kilometers since the day she left her native Pontus, she still spoke Greek with an adorable Pontu-sine accent, rolling r's, hissing cedillas, cracking each acute as if it were a hazelnut or boyish glans.

  I dried my own glans and the rest of what was, in Saint's eyes at least, the true trinity, and pulled on my tunic. "We sure put the old horns on Aquila"—I gave her an ephebic leer—"yet again." I blush when I recall how crude I was, but then, a new thought, how crude she must have been to want to
romp with the likes of me.

  "Please," she spoke sofiJy, eyes luminous as she dabbed ambergris behind her ears. "Do not undo my work. I have given him such confidence. I have made him—^who was so weak—so strong. After all, because of me he ceased to prematurely ejaculate."

  "Hey!" I was impressed. "Now that's really interesting. How did you pull that one off> Tell me all about it, Priscilla."

  Priscilla told me. If Priscilla had a fault it was that she would tell anyone all about everything. In fact, she just couldn't stop telling and advising and analyzing other people's faults and her own virtues. To hear Priscilla tell it, everyone else was deeply sick in the psyche—her word—and she alone was well, thanks to a high-fiber diet, meditation,

  48 Gore Vidal

  and boys from the backwoods, though she would never have brought this last up, since she claimed to be only into deep mature relationships. "Timinimus, do you think it wise at your age to keep on with Paul the way you do dans le litV'

  When not discussing her own successful quest for personal perfection, Priscilla liked to discuss you in terms of herself, which was even worse, I now know. But then I thought she was as wonderful as she did. After all, no one had ever found any depths of any kind in me and so, naturally, I loved all those hours of discussing me even if it was always in terms of her.

  Priscilla had found out everything about Saint and me our first week in Corinth and she was hell-bent on breaking us up in order to set my manhood free—for her, presumably, which of course it was anyway. But trouble was Priscilla's art form. She saw herself—at different times—as a poet, a dancer, a high-class hooker like Aspasia, guiding some great man to even greater greatness. I don't know exactly what she had in mind for me other than the possession of my body, which she got on day one. Looking back, I suppose what really turned her on was breaking up Saint and me because "it could be the absolute end of Christianity if a little bird were to tell everyone the immature things that he does to you because of his early misnurturing and bowel-training in Tarsus."

  While Priscilla went off into that number, I went out on the loggia, already in darkness from the big rock that overhangs downtown Corinth. She followed me, talking, telling, explaining. I poured myself a non-faux e£fyptim beer. When she paused for breath, I said, "Who's going to believe yoi> Everybody knows how Saint hates anything to do with sex."

  "Oh, cheri I've made you angry!" The eyes shone with joy. She ran her fingers through my hyacinthine golden curls,

  making sure to yank every snarl. Tears of pain started to well up in my cornflower-blue eyes. "Why," she whispered in that irresistible accent of hers, "don't you ever shampoo those beautiful blond curls with a real conditioner.>"

  Some women can never get you to wash enough while they themselves neglect to tidy up that which, untidied, can send even the most rampant bull snorting off into the middle distance. "Saint likes the smell of stale olive oil," I lied. "Anyway, chericy don't get on my case."

  At that moment one of Priscilla's other lovers entered her boudoir as if it were an amphitheater at show time. He was skinny and bald and into religion. He was old, too, maybe forty. "I was thinking about the infinite, Priscilla. Hi, Tim."

  "The shortest line between two points," I began.

  ^n^ais-toiy cheri.^^ Priscilla was all aglow. One boudoir, two lovers.

  "I've left my wife." He poured himself wine. He wrote satyr plays but no one would put them on because, as the intendant of the Corinthian State Theater so cruelly put it, "Only satyrs would enjoy them."

  "Oh, I am sad!" Priscilla was ecstatic. Other people's bad news was manna from heaven to her, ambrosia, too. "Perhaps, now, you will see her in her true perspective."

  "She left me, to be honest, for a dancer."

  Priscilla beamed and the black upper gum glistened. "You know how difficile Greek is for me, particularly gender. But my Pontusine ear caught a feminine context for dancer."

  "Maybe," I said, "I'd better go. I'm still just a kid."

  "Stay," said the bald man. "Time to grow up, Tim. I got no secrets. ..."

  "Think what a satyr play you can make out of this

  50 Gore Vidal

  emotional ordeal." Priscilla gave herself a loving glance in her hand mirror.

  "I just did." He pulled a thick scroll out ifrom under his tunic.

  "I really have got to go," I said.

  "No." Priscilla was firm. "You must know about the strong emotions, particularly those of a real man whom I have helped find himself, his kingdom, too. Yes, I regard Glaucon"—Priscilla walked slowly round the seated satyr-play-maker—"as my living work of art. For it was I ... I alone . . . who fi*eed him, broke through the accumulated defensive ice to that molten core of emotions which now he taps as both man and artist. But then that is my role in life, to help others find themselves, to help them to flow fi-om the center of their being, to . . ."

  "Are you decent.>" It was Aquila at the door, with Saint.

  Priscilla was the quickest-wdtted woman I've ever known. She could change her act as fast as it takes most people to blink an eye. She gave a glad cry and, eyes aglow, she danced gracefiilly into her husband's arms, the heavy smell of Asia Minor boy still on her breasts, since she'd done no more than daub them with a bit of ambergris after first douching with myrrh. "Oh, darling Aquila. My work of human art! Paul, welcome! We were praying together, the three of us. ..."

  "Sorry about that," said Aquila. "We'll come back in time for the amens." I always thought that Aquila was pretty thick, but now I realized that he just pretended to be dim so that Priscilla would not share her secrets with him. As it was, between his tent retailership and the marketing of Christianity, he was a rich and very happy man. He was also, Priscilla said proudly, genitally too large for her; even with ambergris, it was a very tight fit. Looking back, it's fimny how we all

  "The amens are now," said Saint. "Amen!" he shouted. Then he took the scroll from the satyr-writer's belt. "More porno, Glaucon.> Oh, my son, turn now to Jesus. Turn your back on satyrs. ..."

  "Not a smart move," said Glaucon with a satyr-smirk. "Unless you happen to be into that into you." He was kind of fun. What he saw in Priscilla was a mystery to me until I discovered that she was subsidizing him in exchange for satyriasis.

  Saint threw the scroll back to him and then, in a manic mood, he grabbed a small mirror, a perfume jar, and two sandals, and began to juggle the four objects. From hand to hand they whizzed back and forth, intersecting dangerously yet never touching, never falling to the floor. During this literally mesmerizing performance. Saint addressed us in his Jesus voice, which was high and shrill and monotonous, just like Our Lord's according to those who had heard Him. "Good news! More good news! There's an opening for us at Ephesus. Elegant, sophisticated, old world Ephesus. Theaters—for the damned. Night clubs—for the damned. The Temple of Diana with the two thousand boobs, each one damned, and the priestesses attached to them, with their astonishing rites—one thousand ladies, count them—^the most spectacular show in the Roman world, and all doomed to eternal torment for they have not found Jesus and so they sin incessantiy. ..."

  "Pagans!" Aquila looked slightiy cross-eyed as perfume jar and mirror sailed counter to one another while the two sandals made alternate landings on Saint's right heel. I've seen him juggle as many as twelve items, one for each disciple and then allowing only one to break on the floor, Judas.

  "Don't worry, Aquila, Priscilla, you'll be more than a match for the temple show. By the time your mission's completed every last Ephesian will be converted and that slut of

  52 Gore Vidal

  a goddess will be on the next oxcart to Mount Olympus, taking early retirement, while the girls will become nuns in the convent of—Saint Priscilla!" Saint was really wired.

  Priscilla's painted brows were highly arched at that moment. Of course she had no idea then that she was going to be a saint like all the rest of us who started out on the ground floor. Basically, Priscilla was just a horny gal who had
a gift for conning the object of her desire with a lot of sweet talk about flowing from the center. "I wonder if I'm ready for Ephesus," she whispered at large.

  "Honey, you're ready for anything," said Aquila, settling onto his couch in the loggia, where he liked to watch the sun set over the Gulf of Corinth, always to the west, as I know from the many sea voyages I've made.

  "Is Ephesus ready for you, cherieV The satyr-writer gave her a wink.

  "Such an old raffine society." She was pensive and, as always when pensive, she started gliding aimlessly about the room. "Sophisticated, world-weary and yet not really first-rate, up to the mark. Where are the salons, the gallants, the wits of Ephesus.^ The enlightened few who can always be counted on to produce—out of a chapenu —a civilization.^"

  Saint ended his juggling act. "We are. You are. The two of you. We're going to convert everybody. There's been a good start made in Ephesus but under new management— me—our church will open its arms and hearts ..."

  "And wallets," I contributed.

  "... to Jesus." Suddenly Saint stopped, as if turned to stone. With a crash, the juggled objects fell to the floor. Then Saint's eyes rolled up in his skull, showing only the whites. He drooled and gagged as he started to swallow his tongue. Epilepsy.

  "It lasts about half an hour," I said. I scooped him up;

  I

  Live from Golgotha 53

  he was completely rigid. "Grand mal, as you can see. Sony to be a party pooper."

  Priscilla paid not the slightest attention to Saint or to me. She was talking now, shyly, charmingly, about herself and what it was like to be a warm and giving person in a world of, let's face it, cold takers. Glaucon had to put up with her because he was there to borrow some obols. Little did he know—or any of us know until some time later—^that Glau-con's dancer-wife was hidden away in Priscilla's spare bedroom. Yes, Priscilla was a disciple of Sappho and she liked to quote that mysterious line of the late burnt-out poetess: "It takes a heap of living to make a house a home."