Skinny Legs and All

by Tom Robbins

  It was her turn, but she hadn’t the belly for major counterattack. Softly, but with practiced conviction, she said, “Art is the only place a person can win.”

  “It may be the only place you can win. I believe we can win any damn place we try.”

  “The trouble with you, Boomer—”

  “Yeah, go ahead now, tell me the trouble with me.”

  “You think the world is a piñata. You think if you keep hitting it and hitting it, smacking it and banging it, one day it’ll bust open and all the prizes will fall out at your feet.”

  He considered that analogy for a moment. Then he said, “Well, I didn’t do that bad last night.”

  “Oh?”

  “Sold every damn piece but one. And if I care to travel with it, that one’s sold, too.”

  Ellen Cherry was gelatinous with shock. She had to steady herself against the lobby wall. “Why . . . why, that’s incredible, Boomer. That must have been . . . incredible . . . for you.”

  “It was right nice. Not all that sensational, really. It woulda been better if you’d showed up. I mean, I kinda thought you might. I appreciate how envious and bitter you are, and I don’t blame you. You know a trillion times more about art than me. But I’ve learned that it isn’t necessary to know all that much. You just make what you wanna see, right? It’s a game, right? It’s like being paid for dreaming.” He laughed. “I feel like an undercover agent. A mole in the house of art. Anyhow, Ellen Cherry, I started out doing it ’cause I wanted to understand you and earn your respect. Then, I reckon, I wanted to show you up, ’cause you’ve always acted so goddamned superior about it. Now, I don’t know. It’s gotten out of hand. Maybe I’m hooked on it, although I feel guilty sometimes. Guilty about you—and guilty about people taking a fool like me so seriously, and guilty ’cause it’s so much fun, in a real nerve-racking, useless sort of way. But that don’t matter. I was heartsick that you didn’t come to the opening. I reckon that’s why I’m pitching a tizzy this morning. Is it still morning?”

  They were silent for several literal minutes. A recorded voice came on the line and instructed Ellen Cherry to deposit additional coins. After the last nickel dropped, with a hollow yet musical clink, like a robot passing a kidney stone, Boomer asked, “What’re you thinking?”

  “I don’t know. What are you thinking?”

  “Oh, well, I was thinking that what was said just now probably needed to be said, but after saying it, I’m starting to think that maybe wisecracking is not so bad, after all.”

  She smiled in such a way that down in the Bowery, on the other end of the line, he could tell that she was smiling. There are smiles that actually travel along telephone wires, although no engineer at Bell Laboratories could explain how it works.

  Boomer answered the smile. “Folks take art too seriously. Did I say that already? But, you know, they take their relationships too seriously, too. I sure used to. Then, you did. This morning, I reckon we both are.”

  “Seems like I used to know that, but then I forgot. Like a strong swimmer who one day just up and drowns.”

  “You cramp and you sink. It can happen to anybody. You let love lay too heavy in your stomach . . .”

  “People tend to take everything too seriously. Especially themselves.”

  “Yep. And that’s probably what makes ’em scared and hurt so much of the time. Life is too serious to take that seriously.”

  Another smile ran along the wires on its badly bowed legs. “I want to see your show. I do. I will. Soon as I whip up the nerve. Then, maybe sometime we could get together and wisecrack a bit.”

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s us do that. I’ll be in touch. Right after I get back from Jerusalem.”

  JERUSALEM. Jeru Salaam. “City of Peace.” The only humorous thing about it was its name. Thirty-seven wars (not battles but wars) fought over it. Reduced to ashes seventeen times by seventeen different conquerors. Each time rebuilt—and each time coveted anew.

  Jerusalem. A dry and hilly provincial pit stop on the windy road to nowhere. Lacking a port, lacking strategic fortress sites, lacking fertile fields around it. No trees to cut, no fish to net, no ore to mine, little but thistles for its flocks to chew. A location with almost nothing to offer, yet desired by everyone. Desired for three thousand years.

  Jerusalem. Jeru Salaam. Shaped out of pure spirit, irrigated with spurting gore. Incessantly blackened by arson and blood, only to be polished to a golden shine again by prayerful knees and unwinding scrolls of dreamlike prophecy. Jerusalem. When they could no longer bear to hear its children screaming, stones went deaf all over the world.

  Jerusalem. A mystical metropolis with seven magic gates. Entered by few, forgotten by none. Simultaneously the capital of death and the seat of immortality. Hub of the wheel of pilgrimage. Focal point of all received starlight. Fly-specked mirror of heaven on earth. Jumping-off place to eternity. The town that logic could not shut down. That city, among all cities, into which both the Second Coming and the Redemption have been booked and to where both the Christ and the Messiah are said to be holding tickets. Jeru Salaam.

  As far as Boomer Petway was concerned, Jerusalem was founded in Sunday school and developed on the six o’clock news. It was not a place that anyone actually visited. It wasn’t even a place one discussed, unless one was a religious or political nut (which was getting to be the same thing). Yet, now he heard himself saying that he was going there, and although such a journey seemed even less real to him than his rise in the art world, he conceded that it was probably true.

  Throughout his adult life, Boomer had saved the cardboard tubes out of toilet tissue rolls. He wasn’t sure why. He had been given the little cylinders to play with when he was a tot, and some affinity for them had likely carried over into his manhood. In any case, he had more than a decade’s worth of toilet tissue rolls stored in the attic of his Colonial Pines bungalow, and when he commenced to make art, he drove his van down to Virginia and loaded them up. Hundreds of them. He sprayed them with black acrylic, and when they were dry, he employed them like Lincoln Logs to construct a sort of hut, five feet wide and seven feet high. Inside the structure, he released a live crow. The crow was provided with a perch made of bathroom tissue rolls (black, like the others), as well as a black plastic water dish and a black ceramic bowl that was kept filled with a dark variety of sunflower seeds. This piece was mounted in his one-man show under the title of Ministry of Covert Operations.

  A curator from the Israel Museum in West Jerusalem’s Givat Ram was sufficiently attracted to the piece to make an offer. The Israeli would purchase it on condition that Boomer accompany it to Jerusalem and personally reassemble it in time to be included in an exhibition dealing with issues of national security as seen through the eyes of artists. That exhibition was set to open in less than two weeks.

  Ultima thought it a good idea, even though it would mean removing the piece from her gallery ahead of schedule. Boomer, who wasn’t completely convinced that Jerusalem existed, said that he’d think it over. It wasn’t until he heard himself informing Ellen Cherry of his departure that he realized that he had already decided to escape the pressures of his estranged wife, his dealer, and his sudden fame, and jet off with a cargo of toilet paper rolls and a cantankerous pet crow to that puzzling city that has been variously described as the Eye, the Navel, the Song, and the Hemorrhage of the world.

  Boomer flew out of JFK in mid-November, expecting to be back in Manhattan for Thanksgiving. Sardined into his carelessly packed satchel, among the jeans, boxer shorts, aloha shirts, and compatible couples of socks, was a single purple stocking that, except for some dubious sentimental value, would have been ash-canned ages ago. Yes, as the ever perverse proclivities of Fate would have it, Clean Sock—Clean Sock!—was winging to Jerusalem.

  Were the unsuspecting and fortuitous traveler’s long-lost twin apprised of the situation, profane oaths would have popped like corks in the basement of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, and it would have
kicked itself from one end to the other of that environment that, to its thinking, was only slightly less dreary and confining than the inside of any sock drawer.

  So, it was just as well that Dirty Sock did not know. He lay, curled and otiose, in front of the grate, innocently awaiting the appearance of Turn Around Norman, paying only a modicum of notice to Can o’ Beans as he/she, in his/her way, speculated to Spoon about the possible size, shape, and significance of the Third Temple of Jerusalem.

  Of the Seven Dwarfs, the only one who shaved was Dopey. That should tell us something about the wisdom of shaving.

  If Can o’ Beans were a man, it’s probable that he/she would be bearded. Some, at least, could imagine the bean can sporting a neatly trimmed vandyke, or else something Lincolnesque; dressed, maybe, in a white suit, frayed of cuff and buttercupped with age; and supported by an eagle-headed cane; imagine the can pensively twirling a snifter of cognac as it pontificated before a library fire at the Explorers Club.

  Perhaps that projection is far too narrow, far too simplistic to do justice to a complex figure, but no matter. As it was, facial hair and the dopey removal thereof was no issue for the tin of beans. It simply did its dignified best to protect what was left of its label as, misshapen and scarred, it squatted atop a soot-powered hymnal, which in turn lay atop an overturned coal bucket, straining to make itself heard above the mad waltz of traffic whose goosey crescendos honked and hissed through the grate. Nevertheless, the dessert spoon that sat at its feet could not have been more attentive had it raised a hand from time to time to stroke a pedagogish tassel of whiskers.

  For Spoon’s benefit, Can o’ Beans had reviewed the information about the First Temple—Solomon’s (or Hiram’s) Temple—that had been imparted upon that shaky, pessimistic day in the aftermath of their ordeals in the Wyoming mountains. Now, he/she was reviewing aloud what they had learned of the Second Temple—Herod’s Temple—from accounts provided, at Can o’ Beans’s prodding, during a siesta in a fossil bed in northwestern Nebraska.

  “I suppose we ought to keep the dates straight,” said Can o’ Beans. “Solomon’s Temple was destroyed in 586 B.C. Right? The Second Temple, its low-rent replacement, was knocked together in 515 B.C. That would mean that for, let’s see, seventy-one years, Jerusalem had no temple at all. Of course, most of the Jews were in exile in Babylon during that period, so there would’ve been no reason for a temple in Jerusalem town. But 515—aren’t you glad, Miss Spoon, that inanimate objects don’t live in history? At least, not in one that requires us to memorize dates. We’re luckier than we admit. No historical dates, no common cold, no income tax, no toe jam, toothaches, dandruff, herpes, halitosis, heartburn, or body hair. Especially body hair. Ugh! Although a smart goatee might be agreeable.”

  “Dry rot,” growled Dirty Sock.

  “Begging your pardon?”

  “At least humans don’t dry rot. Or rust.”

  “Oh, I’m not so sure,” Can o’ Beans disagreed. “Remember those old Republicans we saw at that rally in Iowa?” Spoon tittered. “But, say, Mr. Sock,” the can went on, “do you happen to recall the date when King Herod is said to have renovated the Second Temple?”

  “Sure do. It was back in the year twenty-one afore Christ that the ol’ boy come across that fixer-upper.” Dirty Sock rolled over and turned his full attention to the street, leaving Can o’ Beans and Spoon to gape at each other in mild amazement.

  It was during the Babylonian exile that the patriarchs finally got their monotheistic ducks in a row. In the tens of centuries that had rolled by since the tribe of Abraham made the political decision to promote its local tribal deity. Yahweh, as the one and only god in the cosmos, worship of the Great Mother had continued in Judea and Israel. Ancient Jews loved the Goddess, loved her wisely and well, and even when they came to accept Yahweh, they kept a shrine for her—in their temples and in their hearts. Astarte, or Ashtoreth, as they called her, reigned in the First Temple of Jerusalem alongside Yahweh and periodically, in place of him, a state of affairs that rankled the right-wing misogynists of the Yahwehistic extreme.

  In exile, however, the Jews were unified as they never could have been at home. Oppression and homesickness strengthened their common bond. The more the Babylonians mocked the macho Yahweh, the tighter the Hebrews clung to him as a unique, indigenous cultural icon. Spurred by the prophet Ezekiel, the patriarchal priests hastened to take advantage of the situation.

  It was in Babylon that the heretofore multitudinous, unmanageable laws and rituals of Judaism were edited and codified. New traditions, such as the synagogue, were established. And a stern, broad, inspiring dogma was hammered out of the ancient desert ores that they had hoarded and slowly refined in the fire of their longing. From that time on, a shield of dogmatic brass would deflect every tendered kiss of the Mother. So great was the patriarchs’ hatred and fear of her that she was left unnamed in their transcriptions. When referred to at all, it was as some vague, unspeakable, whorish pagan evil.

  By 538 B.C., when the jubilant exiles were permitted to return to a desolated Judea (it had been leveled in the Babylonian invasion, remember), nearly a half-century of reprogramming would have purged them of their matriarchal affection. It was for the glory of Yahweh and Yahweh alone that they rebuilt their nation, their capital, and their Temple. The Second Temple, although as large as the First, was simple and plain; an odd, impoverished, jerry-built, unembellished religious blockhouse erected upon a pile of rubble. Neither the Goddess nor Conch Shell and Painted Stick would ever see the inside of that particular version—but their days and nights on the Temple Mount were not yet done.

  “Yes, my goodness, yes,” said Spoon, “it’s coming back to me now. We were in that place with all the old petrified creepy-crawly things, and you were under the impression that Conch Shell and Painted Stick had been subjected to some kind of exile of their own, but Conch Shell explained that once they had escaped the rampage of the Babylonian troops, it had been business as usual, as far as their lives were concerned. Wasn’t that the story, ma’am/sir?”

  “Correct. Under cover of darkness, as the expression goes, Mr. Stick and Miss Shell stole down from the Mount of Olives and made their way by starlight to a village, I forget its name, where they knew their goddess to be adored, and there they laid themselves on the doorstep of a priestess. In the morning, they were taken in, no questions asked, dusted off, kissed, and placed immediately upon an altar. Because the Babylonians were lovers of Ishtar, the occupation wasn’t hostile to those activities that Mr. Stick and Miss Shell were employed in. Judea was bread-and-water poor then, I guess; populated by a scattering of downtrodden shepherds, and it surely was a far cry from their glory days in Temple Number One, but our friends apparently were busy and content. As Mr. Stick put it, human folly does not impede the turning of the stars. During the exile, they were at work, never more than a few miles from Jerusalem. What was left of Jerusalem.”

  “But after the Jews returned . . .”

  “Ah, after the return it was a different ball game. Idolatry was no longer tolerated.”

  “As well it shouldn’t be,” said Spoon, with a squeaky firmness. She rotated her dainty stem toward the far corner where the shell and the stick were conferring. “No offense intended.”

  “My dear,” said Can o’ Beans, “don’t you see that an ’idol,’ so-called, is usually just a derogatory name for the other fellow’s god. To a non-Christian, a statue of Jesus could be considered an idol.”

  “Blasphemy! There’s only one god.”

  “And who is that, Miss Spoon? That silversmith in Philadelphia who made you?”

  “You know very well who I mean.”

  “I could take a wild guess. As an object, however, I confess to being bewildered by the whole rigamarole of religion. And I’m convinced that the way Mr. Stick and Miss Shell are involved in it is not at all the same as the way humans are involved. In the Bible, an ’idol’ is any deity other than Yahweh. But there’s a second defin
ition of ’idol’ that describes it as an object that humans worship. An object, Miss Spoon. One of us. Why, you or I could be ’idols,’ if only someone cared enough. Can you imagine Spoonism? Or the Bean Can Cult? The Church of the Dirty Sock? No, I can see that you can’t. No matter. You would have fit in quite well in post-exile Jerusalem, although I daresay there was precious little crème caramel being spooned thereabouts. But our friends didn’t fit in anymore. And after several decades underground, so to speak, they were smothered inside a basket of wool and secreted to Phoenicia on the rump of a camel.”

  “Scary.”

  “Exciting.”

  “A tribulation.”

  “Or an adventure. Depending on your outlook. In any case, they remained in Phoenicia for a very long time. After the Greeks took over Judea, I believe that was around three hundred thirty-something B.C., wasn’t it, Mr. Sock—oh, he’s not listening—they very well could have come back—the Greeks loved beautiful things and were pagan to the tips of their sandals—but our stick and shell were suitably occupied in their native Phoenicia, apparently, and happy to be there.”

  “But separated.”

  “Well, yes, Miss Shell was serving in a splendid temple in Sidon, Jezebel’s old hometown, and Mr. Stick was at sea a lot. On long voyages, Phoenician ships often had priests aboard, and they found a use for Mr. Stick. A combination of scientific and spiritual duties, it sounds like.”

  “They were separated.”

  “No, in ancient times, the scientific and the spiritual were virtually synonymous. At the higher levels, they still are.”

  “I’m not talking about that, you big silly. I mean Conch Shell and Painted Stick were separated. How sad.”