by Ladies
“Three rainy days in a row, or you box it with one sunny day and two rainy. Then you get some rotten s.o.b. telling you he felt drops! But drops ain’t rain!”
Ian, wanting to avoid the ordeal of their visit, offered to voyage out to the Wilderness of Sin to purchase dried fruit, but Gomer told him to stay put.
“I have a ware house full of the golden fuckers,” said Gomer, for this was the way they talked when they were all together. It was fucker this and fucking fuck-balls that.
“We have to tactically leverage this fuck,” said brother number one.
“We have to rebrand the fuck-face,” added brother number two.
When all together, they became one big fat “we.” Ian would try to get into the spirit of it and “we” along with them, but his “we’s” always got caught in his throat.
“The name ‘Golden Calf’ scares people,” said brother number three gravely. “We could start calling them ‘Festive Cows.’ ”
“But ‘Golden Calf’ is a name the public knows,” Gomer reminded them.
“We have to distance ourselves from all that. We can sell cow clothes. Dress ’em up in the latest styles. Tunics! Prayer shawls! Princess Golden Cow for girls. Slap a beard on the fuck-ass and you’ve got a Moses Cow. We’ll call him ‘Mooses.’ A beautiful tribute! We can accessorize. Golden tablets! A golden walking staff!”
“It’s still a golden calf,” said Ian. “It’s just different names for what it is: an idol.”
“Just a different name! Look at the weeping willow. Would you seek its shade were it an overflowing shit bucket bush?”
Then Ian felt his cheek clamped, twisted, pulled, and finally snapped back into place.
“Jackass,” his uncle said with affection.
If the brothers had lived in Egypt during the ten plagues and had owned a boat shack, they’d have gone out in the streets, pitching, the very night the rivers turned to blood.
“But have you tasted the waters?” they’d exclaim, licking their chops. “My hand to Rah—cherry borscht!”
They’d have seen each of the nine ensuing plagues as nine distinct business opportunities. Cursed darkness? Let’s-make-babies night! Hail mixed with fire? Refreshing joy nuggets and fun-time ouchie bolts!
“Can’t we just melt them down and get into a new business?” asked Ian.
“What kind of new business?” brother number one asked, pinching his cheek with warmth.
“Something a little less . . . contentious,” said Ian.
Gomer and his brothers decided that melting down the idols was not an option since half their value was in the craftsmanship. For the brothers the case was closed, but Ian still worried. When he’d go outside to try to calm the agitated crowd, he’d end up learning a lot about New God. His résumé was impressive: divided the Heavens from the Earth, made man from the dust, created the universe—the list went on and on.
When Ian walked outside, the mob swarmed him. The questions were always the same.
“What can your god do?” the crowd demanded.
Never any good under the gun, Ian stuttered and back-pedaled.
“You can polish him,” he said, “and lean against him, too.”
“The Golden Calf is strictly local,” said an intense and scholarly-looking young man named Rodney. “Ram-headed Sun gods. Hawk-bodied Earth gods—it’s so childish.”
“But your god . . . God?”
“You musn’t even speak His actual name!” interrupted Rodney. “He doesn’t like it, so we’ve invented nicknames for Him: He Who Will Kill You. He Who Will Crush You. He Who Will Set You On Fire and Douse the Flames with the Blood of Those You Love. You really have to be careful. The Beneficent One hears all and sees all.”
Ian began to feel New God’s gaze upon him all the time now. Especially when he was voiding his bowels. He was scared of this new god and sometimes even believed he could smell Him. When there was burning in the air, he pictured the angry smoke escaping New God’s ears.
“The consummate god is a forgiving god,” they said on the street. Still, he was scared. For himself and for his father.
And then the rioting began. “No more idols!” they chanted. “Our god trumps all gods.”
Gomer remained unimpressed. He felt protected by the Calf.
“For such a powerful god,” he said, “Invisible God is surprisingly thin-skinned.”
“Ours is a jealous god,” said Ian.
Gomer was struck silent by his son’s words. He stared at Ian a good long time. As a rule, Gomer was never nonplussed. But his son’s words—they nonplussed him.
“I see,” Gomer said, nervously massaging coins through the thin leather of his money pouch. “So now he’s your god.”
“There’s no choice,” Ian said. “He’s taking over.”
“But what about graven images?” asked Gomer. “With your new god there will be none of that! And you love a good graven image! I don’t get it. When you were little, you adored the god of your father.” Gomer reached over and pinched his son’s cheeks with sadness. “What happened?”
“He’s omnipotent,” said Ian, using a word he’d just learned from Rodney. “He can outfight, outthink, and outrace any god you throw at Him.”
“I’ll get my brothers in here and we’ll cook up a new god. We’ll call him ‘Omnipotent Plus One’!”
“This is embarrassing,” Ian said. “It’s also dangerous.”
“I didn’t realize I was embarrassing you,” Gomer said, his pinching fingers limp.
That night, Gomer remained in the showroom, pacing from calf to calf, ruminating.
“What is there for a father to pass down to a son if not his god?” Gomer wondered.
He did not like this new god. He was uncanny, grandiose, and bloodthirsty, but Gomer could also sense that he might have staying power. Even Rah couldn’t work a crowd like This Guy.
And so, the very next day, he brought in the alchemists with their enormous black cauldrons. He knew it would likely mean taking a tremendous beating on the value and he knew it would mean having to shout his brothers down, but Gomer vowed that every last golden hock and udder would be melted. His new idea was to remold the gold into long, thin wands with pointing little index fingers at the tip.
“We’ll market them as commandment pointers,” said Gomer, “to help you read the word of God. You know . . . God god.”
The brothers mulled it over. After a long silence, they spoke.
“Give the people what they want,” said brother number one, who knew when to stand down.
“Gold is gold,” said brother number two.
“Yep,” said brother number three distractedly, for in his mind he was already on to a dozen other hog swindles.
Ian watched the calves melt, their little calf faces poking out of the pots, looking at him. They made him feel almost as guilty as the sight of his father’s face, which was wet and glowing in the heat of the showroom.
When he was a child, Ian could pray so hard. Harder than anyone he knew. It was his thing. He’d squint his eyes, and he’d scrunch up his face. He’d look like he was going to burst a blood vessel, his hands in fists, hoping—willing the world to be a certain way. For the house to quiet down. For good things to happen. For Gomer to notice what a good prayer he was.
When he would finish praying and he’d look around and the world was pretty much the way it had always been, the one thing he felt he could rely on was that the Calf was keeping count, giving out points for effort. At least the Calf knew how hard he was trying.
New God made sense to him, but the Calf made sense to his heart. It was such a part of his childhood— like the smell of certain foods or the tunes his father whistled when they took walks together.
As the years wore on, Ian would often invite Gomer to come and pray with him to New God, and Gomer would tag along and pray—but Ian could always tell his father was just doing it to make him happy.
When Gomer finally died it was at a ripe old age and w
hen Ian prayed for him, prayed for his safe voyage in the hereafter, inevitably, it was often the Calf that he saw.
“Don’t think of the Calf,” he would say to himself, but the harder he prayed and thought about trying not to think about the Calf, the more the Calf would enter his thoughts and prayers. After some years had passed, Ian eventually got used to the intrusions and stopped trying to fight them. In his mind, he looked upon the golden man-headed cow, or the cow-headed man, and he just prayed the best he could.
Samson and Delilah
Samson’s father was an Israelite named Manoah. Manoah was an intellectual who referred to himself as a “man of peace.” He believed the troubles between his people and the Philistines could be solved through nonviolence, so when a Philistine baited him— smacking him in the back of the neck—he would look at his tormentor with this “I pity you” look on his face. In this way, he felt he was initiating social change.
But his son was not naturally given to thoughts of peace. Punching and throwing things around was Samson’s natural way. It wasn’t that he was bad; it was just that he was blessed with a great strength that needed continual venting. It was always that way. During his first few seconds of life, he bit the midwife’s finger with a force that caused her to bleed and cry out, “That little bastard.” At five, he could chop wood with the side of his hand, and at seven, he was able to wrestle a horse to the ground. For Samson, acts of brutishness were like what whistling was to a musical genius—something deep inside that had to come out. Kicking a camel in the stomach and watching it fall to its knees was like hitting a high C.
Manoah was embarrassed by his son’s feats of strength. He found them oafish.
“If you sat down and read a book, then I would be impressed,” his father said.
When he was growing up, Samson wanted to be an angel. Partly it was because he thought it might make his father like him more, but also because he had heard about the feats of strength that angels pulled off— shoving an elephant off an old man’s foot, etc.—so being an angel seemed like the best of both worlds. You could kick ass in the name of peace.
His mother had told him about a nice angel she’d met just before he was born.
“What is your name?” his mother asked the angel.
“It’s nothing you can pronounce,” the angel said.
The angel then told his mother that she would give birth to a special boy who would be as strong as a mountain.
“That’s what he said,” swore Samson’s mother. “A mountain.”
At the age of twelve, Samson went to the market with his father and found a man’s money purse on the ground. Samson scooped up the purse and riffled through it. Suddenly, his father was upon him, producing a little stick, which he broke over his son’s skull.
“I wasn’t stealing,” cried Samson.
Samson did not know if that was true or not. He hadn’t had time to think. People were looking at him. His head was hurting. He wanted to lift his father in the air and dash him against the earth. It was not the kind of thought that angels had.
Samson began thinking less and less about being an angel and concentrated more on what he was truly good at. As an adult, when he looked back upon the day at the market, he would think that that is how you become a certain way. That is how you become who you are. He would not think this thought with sentimentality. He would think it matter-of-factly, while biting into a stick of celery.
At fifteen, Samson had a friend named Jason. Jason was a Philistine but he and Samson got along just fine. Jason was always full of helpful advice. He told Samson that it wasn’t enough to perform feats of strength. You had to distinguish yourself. He told Samson he would need a catchphrase. Jason made a few suggestions: “Bring on the pain,” “Load me up, boys,” and “I am stronger than a tree trunk, and you?”
“Any schmuck can yank a crocodile’s tail off,” said Jason, “but to make the people love you—that’s a gift.”
When working on gimmicks, the first idea that came to Samson was to grow his hair long. His mother, when recounting the story of the angel, would sometimes say he told her Samson was going to be a Nazarite. A Nazarite was a kind of holy man who was not allowed to touch dead people, drink booze, or cut his hair. The angel had told her all kinds of other things, too, most of which she had forgotten, but Samson’s mother had resolved to raise her son like a proper Nazarite.
Samson’s father, who did not have much use for God and superstitions, had attributed his wife’s angelic vision to an attack of the nerves. He refused to have his son go about with the hair of pony.
There was one summer, though, when Samson was in his thirteenth year, when his father was away traveling on business, that his bangs got long enough to fall into his eyes. He liked the way they felt there. He liked blowing them out of the way, because it gave him something to do when people looked at him. He wanted to keep growing his hair until it reached his chin, but when his father returned, he told Samson that he looked like a girl. Samson told his father that he did not care and his father slapped him in the nose.
So now, two years later and quite full grown, Samson decided to grow his hair once again. This was in the days before barbarians, and it was not common to see a long-haired warrior. Fighters and strong men commonly kept their hair short because they tended to crack things against their skulls, and, aesthetically speaking, it was more pleasing to see a brickbat shatter against a clean scalp.
As the months wore on, Samson took great satisfaction in the growth of his hair. Seeing it get longer really made him feel like he was doing something; and it might have only been his imagination, but he did feel stronger. And who in his right mind would accuse him of looking like a girl now? His biceps were the size of thighs and his thighs the size of watermelons. He cracked pecans between his pectorals! His fingers, when rigid, were as lethal as daggers. (He had once stabbed a pig through the neck with his pinkie finger, and the shock of how soft and wet it was in there caused him to withdraw with a high-pitched yip that shocked the gathering crowd.)
In his father’s presence, he tied his hair back in a bun. Manoah thought it made Samson look like a certain great-aunt of his, a sour-faced unenlightened woman whom he never could stand.
When Samson was eighteen he met a young Philistine named Delilah. She worked at the market selling eggs and knickknacks. Delilah was a class act. She was demure!
“One must be careful with eggs,” she would say in a hushed voice. “They are the fragile heart of the world.”
When Delilah danced and her skirts rose into the air, for Samson it was like God was saying, “ta-dum.” It was like the whole world was nothing, just a joke, and the only thing that mattered was Delilah’s legs. He adored her so much that he sometimes pretended he was Delilah. He said things that he could imagine Delilah saying, things that he thought were intelligent and poetic.
“Eggs,” he would say. “They make a mess when they fall on the floor.”
He thought about Delilah all the time. Sometimes he thought about her so fiercely that it felt as if his mighty head was going to crack right down the middle. He found himself buying sixty to seventy eggs a week and pretending it was Delilah who had laid them, that she had kept each egg warmed beneath her buttocks, waiting for Samson to taste them. Eating her eggs made him feel close to her. He would crack each one into his mouth and let it leak down his throat.
When he saw Delilah, mostly all he could do was smile because when he spoke, only nonsense came out. Yet when he was alone in the fields near his home, he grew bold. He would swear his love to her while holding on to the bangs of his hair with his fists. “I love you, Delilah,” he would say, his arms wrapped around a tree. He would say it over and over, getting a little louder each time until the tree snapped. Speaking those words made him drunk.
Eventually, Samson came up with an idea to win Delilah’s heart: he would show up at the market and perform feats of strength. He and Jason would set up the operation directly across from her sta
nd, and all the while, as he performed, he would look her right in the eye. A part of him felt like it was a pretty immature thing to do, but he didn’t know what else he had to offer and he had to do something.
So Samson would drag a baby elephant to the market and struggle with the poor animal until he had it raised over his head. As he performed, people gathered around to watch. He would scan the crowd to make sure his father was not present, then he would stick out his stomach and try to get his footing right. Next, he would haul the calf over his head and look right at Delilah, to see what she made of the whole thing. As Samson looked at her, he tried to fill his mind with the greatest, most beautiful things so that maybe she would see greatness and beauty in his eyes. As he watched her, the elephant held high in the air, he thought about running his hands up her legs. He thought about kissing her.
He continued his act in the market and it turned into a nice gig. At the end of each day he would hand all of the money he earned to his father and his father would just stare at him blankly as though deep in thought about something of a geopolitical nature.
Samson often wondered what it was that made a man strong. As big as he was, there were men who were bigger, yet he was the strongest. There was just something inside him that pushed harder than anyone else. But what was that something? Was it an angel? An angel that was struggling to get himself out of there? An angel that was dying of frustration?
Yes, he was strong, but he was not as strong as people thought he was. The crowds who gathered to watch always figured Samson was holding a little something back. Holding something back was the way of the strong man. The strong man doled out a feat of strength here and there, always keeping you guessing. He made you feel like his greatest tour de force was yet to come, careful not to blow his load too soon. The truth was, though, that Samson had nearly given himself a hernia when he lifted up the platform of twelve men. In the middle of the performance he felt his balls drop and his spine become an uncertain worm. If Delilah had not been present, he would have started crying.