by Tom Robbins
“Oh? And what target would that be?”
“Hush. I’ve said too much already. But lemme set you straight on somethin’. The Arab and the Jew that runs that peacenik greasy spoon, it’s their own people that wants it shut down the most. Their own kind.”
Ellen Cherry had to admit that that seemed the case. “But why?” she asked.
“Because they are not real Arabs and Jews, them two. They are not religious! That Arab, Hadee, he’s well-known as an infidel, a livin’ insult to the teachings of Islam. They wouldn’t let him touch Mecca with a ten-foot pole. And that ol’ Jewboy, Cohen, when was the last time he set foot in a synagogue? He sports a Yid accent that’d curdle a bowl of schmaltz, but I understand that in private he can spout English as pretty as you or me. How can they pass themselves off as representatives of their people when neither one of ’em subscribes to the deepest beliefs of their people?”
“They’re kind, decent, compassionate—”
“Kind and decent got nothin’ to do with it! In the End Times, there’re to be many false prophets and false religions. You, little lady, your false religion is art. Verlin, I often suspect, his religion is football. He ain’t alone in that one, lemme tell you. Patsy’s religion I don’t want to speculate on. But the most insidious and dangerous of false religions is secular humanism. It’s so crafty, so sneaky, with its kindness and its decency, that only Satan hisself could’ve come up with it. Well, that’s precisely what them two old peaceniks practice, and that’s precisely why they’re so offensive to the truly devout, includin’ the Moslems and the Jews. I told Boomer and I’m tellin’ you, I want you to pull outta that heathen café, git back in holy matrimony where you belong, ’cause I can’t be responsible for your safety there.”
EARLY RELIGIONS WERE LIKE MUDDY PONDS with lots of foliage. Concealed there, the fish of the soul could splash and feed. Eventually, however, religions became aquariums. Then, hatcheries. From farm fingerling to frozen fish stick is a short swim.
The Reverend Buddy Winkler was correct about Spike Cohen and Roland Abu Hadee: they did not glide in numb circles inside a glass box of religion. In fact, they, Spike and Abu, wouldn’t hesitate to directly attribute the success of their relationship to their lack of formal religion. Were either of them actively religious, it would have been impossible for them to be partners or pals. Dogma and tradition would have overruled any natural instinct for brotherhood.
It was as if Spike and Abu had been granted a sneak preview behind the veil, a glimpse in which it was revealed that organized religion was a major obstacle to peace and understanding. If so, it was a gradual revelation, for it unfolded slowly and separately, a barely conscious outgrowth of each man’s devotion to humanity and rejection of doctrine.
At best, perhaps when the fourth veil does slip aside, Spike and Abu will be better prepared than most to withstand the shock of this tough truth: religion is a paramount contributor to human misery. It is not merely the opium of the masses, it is the cyanide.
Of course, religion’s omnipresent defenders are swift to point out the comfort it provides for the sick, the weary, and the disappointed. Yes, true enough. But the Deity does not dawdle in the comfort zone! If one yearns to see the face of the Divine, one must break out of the aquarium, escape the fish farm, to go swim up wild cataracts, dive in deep fjords. One must explore the labyrinth of the reef, the shadows of lily pads. How limiting, how insulting to think of God as a benevolent warden, an absentee hatchery manager who imprisons us in the “comfort” of artificial pools, where intermediaries sprinkle our restrictive waters with sanitized flakes of processed nutriment.
A longing for the Divine is intrinsic in Homo sapiens. (For all we know, it is innate in squirrels, dandelions, and diamond rings, as well.) We approach the Divine by enlarging our souls and lighting up our brains. To expedite those two things may be the mission of our existence.
Well and good. But such activity runs counter to the aspirations of commerce and politics. Politics is the science of domination, and persons in the process of enlargement and illumination are notoriously difficult to control. Therefore, to protect its vested interests, politics usurped religion a very long time ago. Kings bought off priests with land and adornments. Together, they drained the shady ponds and replaced them with fish tanks. The walls of the tanks were constructed of ignorance and superstition, held together with fear. They called the tanks “synagogues” or “churches” or “mosques.”
After the tanks were in place, nobody talked much about soul anymore. Instead, they talked about spirit. Soul is hot and heavy. Spirit is cool, abstract, detached. Soul is connected to the earth and its waters. Spirit is connected to the sky and its gases. Out of the gases springs fire. Firepower. It has been observed that the logical extension of all politics is war. Once religion became political, the exercise of it, too, could be said to lead sooner or later to war. “War is hell.” Thus, religious belief propels us straight to hell. History unwaveringly supports this view. (Each modern religion has boasted that it and it alone is on speaking terms with the Deity, and its adherents have been quite willing to die—or kill—to support its presumptuous claims.)
Not every silty bayou could be drained, of course. The soulfish that bubbled and snapped in the few remaining ponds were tagged “mystics.” They were regarded as mavericks, exotic and inferior. If they splashed too high, they were thought to be threatening and in need of extermination. The fearful flounders in the tanks, now psychologically dependent upon addictive spirit flakes, had forgotten that once upon a time they, too, had been mystical.
Religion is nothing but institutionalized mysticism. The catch is, mysticism does not lend itself to institutionalization. The moment we attempt to organize mysticism, we destroy its essence. Religion, then, is mysticism in which the mystical has been killed. Or, at least diminished.
Those who witness the dropping of the fourth veil might see clearly what Spike Cohen and Roland Abu Hadee dimly suspected: that not only is religion divisive and oppressive, it is also a denial of all that is divine in people; it is a suffocation of the soul.
AS NIGHT BUTTONED the spires of St. Patrick’s in its blouse, Buddy Winkler gave Ellen Cherry a hard, nervous hug. “I’ll be prayin’ for you, doll baby,” he called, hurrying off to a meeting with some of his Jews. “And I’ll be in touch. You git yourself straightened out, you heah?"
She waved meekly. When she turned back in the direction of downtown, Turn Around Norman was gone. He was slow to rotate, fast to fly. She hadn’t even had an opportunity to throw a donation in his box.
Well, she’d be sure to return the following day. Tomorrow, I’ll slip him a twenty, she thought. Extravagant, maybe, but she felt a responsibility to encourage him. After all, he was one of a kind—and as far as she could tell, there was no one else who so much as acknowledged his existence.
As far as she could tell. The fact was, there had been five pairs of eyes on Turn Around Norman all day. Perhaps “eyes” was not quite the right word. From a grate over a shaft that led into the basement of the cathedral, Turn Around Norman’s performance had been watched at length and with interest by an odd quintet of inanimate objects, hiding there in the cellar.
There was a voluptuous seashell watching Turn Around Norman. There was a decorated stick. There was a little silver spoon, a man’s frazzled stocking, and a battered lump of tin from which hung scraps of paper that once had proclaimed the lump to be a can of pork and beans.
The Fifth Veil
ONCE UPON A TIME, the wolfmother went to market and picked out wallpaper. It was patterned in spirals and molecular chains. It was bordered with electrons and well-gnawed bones. The wolfmother licked the tip of the salesman’s shoelace and turned it into jade. That was her down payment.
Once upon a time, a painted stick and a conch shell arrived in New York City. The shell was warm, heavy, and wet, like the earth, the sea. The stick pointed at the sky. On its tip, it balanced configurations of gases. Although they ha
d traveled long and far, the painted stick and the conch shell were not welcome in New York City. Accustomed to the protection of holy places, they hid in the cellar of a midtown cathedral. It was just a place to rest while they figured out a way to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Nevertheless, they were compelled to remark on how much its ambiance might have been improved by the right kind of wallpaper.
THERE WERE TWO MORE BOMB scares at the I & I that week. Both occurred during dinner, so Ellen Cherry was not directly affected. The publicity reached her, though. Coming or going, she had to wade through the cameras of the curious. Like a reclusive movie actress, she donned a scarf and dark glasses, and studied her walking feet as if she had a research grant from the Stubbed Toe Foundation. Her fear was that she would encounter Buddy on the picket line. Or that he would recognize her in a media picture. Family trouble was the worst kind. Some families ran their own little versions of the Middle East. Come to think of it, what was the Middle Eastern situation but a family squabble that had gotten out of hand? Isaac v. Ishmael.
Her parents phoned her at work. “I’m busy,” she lied. The only customers in the most famous restaurant in New York were two tables of Japanese tourists, drinking green Egyptian beer and giggling uncontrollably at the baba ghanoug.
“How many eating places in New York City? Ten thousand? Twenty thousand? More? Your mama says ’more.’ And you gotta hook up with the only blessed one that’s—”
“Relax, Daddy, the worst is over. There’re not going to be any further explosions.”
Indeed, the week passed without violence, and as a result, onlookers thinned out considerably, another example of the teeny-weeniness of the metropolitan attention span. But there was an explosion. It happened in the safety of Ellen Cherry’s own apartment, and while it had been expected, still, it nearly blew her into backward somersaults. The “bomb” was an invitation to Boomer Petway’s one-man show at the Ultima Sommervell Gallery.
THE DAY THEY ARRIVED in New York, they had aimed the Airstream directly for Seventy-third and Broadway, where a one-bedroom apartment awaited them in the orchidaceous Ansonia Hotel. They were subletting from a sculptor who had moved to Florence for three years and who, in turn, was subletting from the new curator of contemporary art at the Seattle Art Museum, a man who admired Ellen Cherry’s talent. This curator also had provided a letter of introduction to the prominent dealer, Ultima Sommervell.
As quickly as they were settled, as quickly as they had made the bed, scoured the bathtub, and stocked the kitchenette shelves with ramen, pizza mix, Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, and six brands of roach killer, Ellen Cherry had fetched her slides to the Sommervell Gallery. Ultima didn’t exactly fall out of her Josef Hoffman “Sitzmaschine” chair, but she was interested enough to promise to come up to the Ansonia and examine the paintings themselves. Three days later, she came.
For his part, Boomer had found that welding shops were located mainly in the outer boroughs. Holding out for a job in Manhattan, he was lying around the apartment reading an espionage novel when Ultima showed up. She was so breathless that they thought she must have climbed the stairs. It turned out that she had chanced upon the big roast turkey in a nearby parking lot and suffered a cultural experience of the brightest magnitude.
“Why, ol’ Boomer made that,” said Ellen Cherry, innocently, pointing to the husky fellow lounging on the sofa in a T-shirt, Colonial Pines High School track shorts, and one purple sock.
“Really? Really, darling? Oh, magnifique!”
Ultima Sommervell was tall, dark, and jumpy, somewhere on the dry side of thirty. Her face was shaped like a strawberry and colored like an olive, simultaneously soft and tart. She was simply but elegantly attired and coiffured, the kind of woman who might have been designed by a Bauhaus architect, except for her bosom, whose free-flowing volume all but contradicted the severe planes of the rest of her body, impeding her balance, creating such a clashing contrast that, speaking strictly aesthetically, she might have benefited from a double mastectomy. It was as if Gropius had created her, then allowed Gaudi to add the boobs. In a spitty British accent, which reminded Ellen Cherry of a schoolgirl trying to mimic Alfred Hitchcock, she continually interrupted her self-assured appraisals of Ellen Cherry’s canvases to query Boomer about the drivable bird.
“What I find in your pictures finally is an awkward dichotomy between illusion and abstraction. Energetic, yes; charming, yes; but as I said, awkward. They typify the unlovable nuttiness of modern art before it finally matured and developed a social conscience.” She turned to Boomer. “What are you saying with your enormous silver turkey, Mr.—ah—Boomer? It seems fraught, simply fraught, with commentary.”
Professing that the market was running rather thin for what she termed “socially insignificant picture-making,” Ultima nevertheless agreed to represent Ellen Cherry on a limited basis. She selected three paintings, requesting that they be delivered to her gallery. Her uptown gallery, not the SoHo branch where, Ellen Cherry knew, all the action was. Then she asked Boomer if she might have a tour of his “monstre sacré.”
Wriggling into his jeans, Boomer seemed eager to accommodate her.
When they had gone, Ellen Cherry didn’t know whether to be glad, mad, or sad. She’d gotten a foot in the door of a major gallery, no mean accomplishment for an unknown artist fresh from the ferns. It ought to have been New Year’s Eve squared in her heart. But she wasn’t happy with the way Ultima had carried on about that dumb turkey. She wasn’t happy with the way Boomer had stared at Ultima’s tits.
“Really, darling?” she found herself muttering, after Boomer and Ultima disappeared into the elevator. “Oh magnifuckingfique.”
The first ax hit the persimmon tree when Boomer informed his wife that Ultima was going to sell the turkey for him.
“I thought it was my turkey. I thought it was my wedding present.”
“Yeah, but you don’t get the picture, honey sugar. This isn’t no used-car deal. Ultima wants to sell it as art. And I’m the artist. I made the fool thing.”
Wasn’t that cute? It was art and he made it. Well, okay, let him enjoy his delusion. Ellen Cherry had to confess that the turkey was a novel idea, and she was all too aware that it was costing a small fortune to park it in the neighborhood. Whereas, should it sell, she would share in the proceeds and could replenish her materials. She decided to be pleased.
But further chips flew when Boomer commenced to accompany Ultima to the “presentations.” She was pitching the Airstream two or three times a week, Boomer at her side. At her front is more like it, thought Ellen Cherry, examining her own petite protrusions in the bathroom mirror. Suspecting that cookies were being eaten behind her back, she began to test Boomer in bed. Either his relationship with Ultima was strictly business or he was, indeed, a biological marvel.
But there was a rain of green persimmons on their coital parade following the eventual purchase of the rolling roast by the Museum of Modern Art. Ellen Cherry had thought that the sale would be the end of it, that Boomer would use his half of the profits to set up his own welding shop and they would return to the life they had plotted and planned. But no, according to Ultima, Boomer was in demand. His turkey was a smash, and he was constantly being invited to parties and gallery openings. For a while, Ellen Cherry went along. She was even grateful at first for this backdoor entry into the New York art scene, although rather quickly she came to think of it as entering a peacock through its rectum. She withdrew.
“In the old days,” she complained, “and it wasn’t that long ago, artists had the best parties in the world. They had wild and imaginative parties. There was romance, there was colorful behavior and brilliant conversation. Look at these posing contests we’re being dragged to! Look at these artists we’re being bored by! They’re vain as fashion models and shallow as real-estate developers. All they talk about is money. Careers. And will any single one of them look you in the eye? No sirree. They’re too busy looking over your shoulder so that if something new shoul
d pop up on the horizon, they’ll be sure to notice it—and exploit it—before you do.”
“I guess that’s what I like about ’em,” said Boomer. “They aren’t these great soaring eagles of genius like I imagined famous artists would be. They’re just as pretty as everybody else.”
“They weren’t always. Artists used to be special. A breed apart. It wasn’t that long ago.”
While Ellen Cherry was genuinely disappointed by her introduction to the New York art world, by the revelation that it was just like Seattle’s, only bigger, part of her dissatisfaction may be attributed to the fact that her husband was lionized at the parties, was treated as if he were the creative one, while she, except by the occasional lecher or fancier of ungovernable hairdos, was largely ignored.
Boomer continued to go out. Vanity Fair reported that he was “Ultima Sommervell’s favorite escort.” The art world took to Boomer Petway. He was a welcome shot of gamma globulin in its jaundiced system. People who ought to know better were delighted with his upbeat redneck manners, his muscles, his aloha shirts and new red beret. When he and Ultima performed the tango at their favorite club, Boomer adding bizarre little variations due to his lame foot, Liberty’s torch wasn’t good enough to light his cheap cheroots.
Ellen Cherry sat at the Ansonia, wrapped in her belief in the unique and the beautiful, solaced by her eye game, and further comforted by the knowledge that, (1) a check soon would be arriving from the Museum of Modern Art, and, (2) Boomer would ball her with bravura once he got home—although the hour of his homecomings seemed to be inching steadily in the direction of sunrise.
The chain saw didn’t run amok in their persimmon grove until that dawn when Boomer, instead of making love to her, wanted to talk about art.