by Tom Robbins
Back at St. Patrick’s, Dirty Sock was groaning. “She blew it. Oh, man, she flat out blew it. I knowed I shoulda done the job myself.”
Can o’ Beans, on the other hand, was unperturbed. He/she explained to the stick and the shell that Spoon, in her panic, may have made a fortuitous choice. “As far as I’m concerned,” he/she said, “the little dear’s better off with Miss Charles than with Turn Around Norman. Just because our mysterious Mr. Norman has discovered the welding defect in humanity’s ironclad notion of progress doesn’t mean he’s ready to actively participate in the schemes of the inanimate. True, Miss Charles may drop dead at the prospect herself, but unless she’s changed, we do know that she’s compassionate and eccentric—an excellent combination in a human being; we know that she kept me for four years without opening me up; we know she was fond of Miss Spoon and of your beloved Jezebel; and I feel we may be able to squeeze some valuable assistance from her without directly revealing ourselves to her. You know what I mean? A modicum of subtle manipulation. Harmless, of course.”
Conch Shell nodded, while Painted Stick stared off into space, perhaps reminiscing about a time when the gulf between animate and inanimate was not quite so wide.
“Anyhow,” the bean can continued, “Miss Charles shows up here in front of the cathedral almost as regularly as Mr. Turn Around. If Spoon uses her wits and follows your instructions, she’ll be back with us tomorrow or the day after. And with any luck, we’ll be better informed about our chances for Jerusalem.”
Alas, Can o’ Beans would have been less optimistic, Spoon less brave, were either of them privy to Ellen Cherry’s private thoughts. As she trod back down East Forty-ninth Street, wagging the doggie bag in the frigid ebony air (the added weight of the dessert spoon going unnoticed), Ellen Cherry was deciding that since she was forsaking her personal artisthood, she must also forsake art over all. In general. Period. Otherwise, it would be akin to divorcing a man about whom she still cared, then hanging around to watch how he got along with his new wife. Could she not be a participant, she damn sure wasn’t going to be a spectator.
But if her vow of rejection would end her dilemma about whether or not to attend Boomer’s show (the exhibition had her both itching with curiosity and recoiling with distaste), it would likewise end her cultural pilgrimages to Fifth Avenue, her repetitive homages to “the only real artist in New York.” By the time that she reached the Mel Davis Dog Boutique, its turkey cutout now a nostalgic silhouette in the night, she promised herself that she had been to see Turn Around Norman for the very last time.
Clearly, Ellen Cherry was going to miss the street performer. What was less clear was why.
Earlier, she had told herself that she was drawn to him for the same reason that Spike Cohen was drawn to Jerusalem: Turn Around Norman was not about money.
But was it entirely accurate to claim he was not about money? And if so, what was the big appeal of that?
Turn Around Norman didn’t turn around for free. Nearly, but not quite. One could watch him for hours, weeks, and not pay a penny. On the other hand, his donation box—a cardboard container in which a child’s jigsaw puzzle had once been packaged—was invariably in plain view, and there existed no overt prohibition against monetary contributions of Rockefellerian scope. Still, he was fortunate if he collected three bucks a day. Thus, while he seemed willing, even mildly eager, to accept a cash offering as an expression of appreciation for his work, his art, his turning around slowly on the street, he obviously had motives beyond the financial. Or else he was shooting without film in his camera.
To Ellen Cherry’s mind, the fact that Turn Around Norman was dedicated to a rigorously controlled minimal act to the extent that he performed it relentlessly, day after day (except Wednesday afternoons), in sweet or murderous weather, before oblivious and occasionally abusive audiences, regardless of negligible material reward, all of that signified that he believed in something. No doubt, Jerusalem believed in something, as well. She didn’t know what. For that matter, she had only a hunch about Norman’s beliefs. Apparently, he believed in turning around.
“The trouble with these new New York artists,” she had once complained to Boomer, “aside from the fact that they’re busy stealing from the dead and each other—if that’s not redundant—is that they’re only in it for fame and fortune, they don’t believe in anything.”
“Yes, they do,” argued Boomer. “They believe in fame and fortune.”
So. Were there qualitative differences in believing in turning around slowly, very slowly, on the street and believing in fame and fortune? Was an obsession with money a slimy, shameful, rodent-lipped thing compared to an obsession with art?
Being two months behind on her rent at the Ansonia and facing a self-imposed reduction in wages, Ellen Cherry was in the uncomfortable position of having to consider a settlement from Boomer, of having to ask to be cut in on the earnings from his show at the Sommervell Gallery, a show she had just made up her mind to boycott. In order to maintain her current standard of living, she would have to be subsidized by sales of artworks created by a man who she knew didn’t believe in anything, which is to say, who believed neither in his work nor hers. She had never objected to trading paintings for dollars. In fact, there was a time when she, Ellen Cherry, had maintained a salivary hankering for fortune and fame. It was not so long ago. But something had changed. . . .
Observing it at close range, artistic success, in socioeconomic terms, proved more of a demon than she had bargained for. Gradually, she found herself repulsed by the realization that her lifelong eye game (her private amusement and personal salvation) could be reduced to a commodity, like soda pop, jeans, TV Christianity, or Preparation H. The relationship between art and money was incomprehensible to her. It was as complicated as the Middle East, and not a rug in sight.
Money itself was incomprehensible. Almost from its inception, it had perplexed and befuddled those in whose lives it had appeared, and although modern people were used to it, although they dealt with it on a daily, if not hourly basis, and although it worked in their every thought the way that yeast worked in bread, they were no closer to understanding it than they had been at the beginning. Preoccupied with it, dominated—and ultimately bewildered—by it, introspective men and women finally had to confess that it clouded their vision of the world like . . . yes, you guessed it, like a veil.
When the fifth veil falls, and with it the illusion of financial worth, individuals might recognize themselves again, might find themselves standing, as if naked, among ancient values in a long-lost landscape.
Meanwhile, it can be stated with some validity that for all of the clamorings and phobias that it generates, money barely exists. An abstraction, a symbol, an act of faith, an IOU backed only by a banker’s word, money is first and foremost a substitute. The funny part is that it’s a substitute for things that often do not exist.
Within the framework of its temporal unfolding, however, turning around on the street is real.
Both money and art, powdered as they are with the romance and poetry of the age, are magic. Rather, money is magic, art is magik. Money is stagecraft, sleight of hand, a bag of clever tricks. Art is a plexus of forces and influences that act upon the senses by means of practical yet permanently inexplicable secret links. Admittedly, the line between the two can be as thin as a dime. What’s more, the magicians of capitalism strengthen their hold on their audience through the manipulation of artistic images.
Long before the veil of commerce drooped down over the eyes of art, it had impaired the sight of religion. Ancient temples, pagan or otherwise, almost always doubled as treasuries and mints. The Temple of Jerusalem was no exception. The First Temple and both versions of the Second had served as financial centers for the state of Judah/Judea. Ellen Cherry wasn’t aware of that. The Reverend Buddy Winkler probably was, but the light in which Buddy had seriously examined religion’s ties with wealth was understandably dim. Can o’ Beans was definitely aware of
it, yet in his/her speculations on what the Third Temple might resemble, he/she had avoided any conjecture on if and how it might interface with the Bank of Israel. Even the fearless intellect of the bean tin found the subject forbidding.
What is plain is that neither money nor the love of it is the root of all evil. Evil’s roots run deeper than that. Anyway, money is not a root. Money is a leaf. Trillions of leaves, actually; dense, bushy, dollar-green, obscuring the stars of reality with their false canopy. Who says that money doesn’t grow on trees?
The introduction of money, with its seductive, if largely ambiguous promises, added a fresh measure of zip to the sport of life, but the zip turned to zap when the players, stupefied by ever-shifting intangibles, began to confuse the markers with the game.
So, even for those of us who can’t personally witness Salome’s dance, the fifth veil surely will fall. It will fall at the moment of our death. As we lie there, helpless, beyond distraction, electricity stealing out of our brains like a con man stealing out of a sucker’s neighborhood, it will occur to many of us that everything we ever did, we did for money. And at that instant, right before the stars blink off, we will, according to what else we may have learned in life, burn with an unendurable regret—or have us a good silent laugh at our own expense.
THIS IS THE ROOM of the wolfmother wallpaper. The room where the lobster tore the pillowcase, mistaking it for. . . . Whoops! Hold on. Speaking of mistakes, this is actually a far cry from the boudoir the wolfmother papered. This is not a room at all. This happens to be the intersection of East Forty-ninth Street and United Nations Plaza, where an abrupt, unexpected flurry of snow, propelled by a gust from the river, whipped Ellen Cherry’s chapped face, driving all thoughts of money and art from her cerebrum, causing ice crystals to collect in the badly sprung honeycomb of her hair, and momentarily precipitating a hallucination of crustaceans and bed sheets, a flashback, perhaps, to a room in which her neurons may have strayed off course a forgotten dream ago.
Shaking off the image, the snow, the gust, the dip in temperature, she rounded the corner onto UN Plaza, only to witness in front of the I & I yet another scene that might have spun from a dream. There was a murmuring crowd. A hysteria of flashing red lights. A harsh arrival of men costumed for emergency.
At first, Ellen Cherry surmised it to be a spillover from the earlier demonstration at the UN building down the street, but as she drew nearer, she saw that the crowd was gathered passively about two lone men lying on the sidewalk in separate echo circles of blood. One of the men, who was being covered with a sheet, was Sylvester, a security guard in the restaurant’s employ. The other, attended by medics, was Spike Cohen.
Ellen Cherry dropped the doggie bag on the pavement (within minutes, the bag—Spoon and all—was cordoned off by police, and the NYPD bomb squad was on its way to investigate it). She pushed her way to Spike and fell on her knees at his side. Blood was spurting from his head like rotgut from a wineskin. His eyes were wide, and he gasped as if trying to swallow all the air in the world.
Her stalled heart began to thump again when she realized that he was alive. But at that same hopeful moment, a voice of premonition rang in her ears. She didn’t know from where it came or whose voice it was. It startled her to the extent that she stood up halfway and looked around. The voice said, “Boomer Petway won’t be coming home from Jerusalem.”
Why not? And what did that have to do with what was going on here?
She felt Abu’s hand on her shoulder.
She overheard a snatch of song from an unseen boom box:
My heart is a Third World country
And your love is a tourist from Switzerland
She had never heard it before, yet it was eerily familiar. (A day would come when she would recognize it as Raoul Ritz’s first recording.)
When she returned her attention to Spike, she fully expected him to be dead. However, the medics had capped the spurt, and there was a kind of weak grin on his face. From his vantage point down on the blood-warmed cement, he could inspect at his leisure every shoe in the crowd.
The Sixth Veil
THE COLD SPELL snapped in mid-December. Christmas shoppers went about in their shirt-sleeves. Poinsettias could have grown along Fifth Avenue, the days were so balmy and grand. The waxing moon was a winter moon, typically high and pasty, but the nights in which it swelled were as mild as baby oil. By Christmas Eve, the moon was full. It rolled in the sky like a spook wheel, a hoop of grainy ghost cheese. Despite the fact that it was the brighter of the two, the Christmas star kept its distance from that moon.
Midnight mass at St. Patrick’s drew a capacity crowd. The archbishop spoke in a long-dead language about a long-dead carpenter. Nevertheless, an air of solemn gaiety prevailed. Down in the subbasement, the choir barely audible to them, the inanimates lounged in the moonlight that streamed through the grate.
“It’s a crying shame little Spoonzie ain’t here,” said Dirty Sock. “She’d enjoy the puddin’ outta these carols and hymns.”
“Indeed, she would,” Can o’ Beans agreed. “Indeed, she would. Personally, I prefer carols to rap tunes, but not by a wide margin. The carol radiates hope, the rap radiates aggression, but both are rooted in humanity’s overwhelming feeling of helplessness.”
“Stow it, perfesser. Give us a friggin’ break. It’s Christmas Eve!”
“And what might that occasion have to do with you, my polyester pal?”
In an attempt to head off a tiff, Conch Shell treated the can and the sock to a description of the winter festivals that had been held at that time of year on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount. Evidently, the service under way upstairs was rather pale in comparison, although even Painted Stick, taking time out from his contemplation of that point where the beam of the moon intersected light from the star, had to admit that the pipe organ provided musical possibilities unimagined by drum or tambourine.
“Music has changed,” said Painted Stick. “But the star in the East is the same.”
Outside, in the newspaper delivery trucks that were making their early rounds, the headlines read: “Troops Ring Bethlehem as Tense Pilgrims Flock.”
And in the men’s toilet at Isaac & Ishmael’s restaurant, over on United Nations Plaza, Verlin Charles stared through a tiny window at the Christmas star as he stood with his hand on his fly.
Verlin and Patsy had expected Ellen Cherry home for Thanksgiving, but she stood them up. At the last minute, she realized that she couldn’t face the prospect of looking down the long oak table at a roast turkey, what with Boomer not yet back from Jerusalem. Her parents were disappointed but accepted her promise to spend Christmas in Colonial Pines. When Boomer’s return was further delayed, she had backed out on Christmas as well.
“Fine and dandy,” said Patsy. “If she won’t come to us, we’ll go to her.”
“Hold your horses, woman,” said Verlin. “Are you talkin’ New York City? Christmas? Us?”
“All of the above. It’ll be family. And it’ll be romantic.”
“It’ll be a blessed nightmare. Of all the places to have Christmas . . .”
“Bud’ll be there.”
“I don’t care.”
“And I’ll be there.”
Verlin sputtered. He could tell that she was serious. Dad blast it! She had him over a barrel. He could celebrate the holiday alone—alone!—in Colonial Pines, or celebrate it with conniving wife and errant daughter in a hellish heathen cesspool where their lives wouldn’t be worth two cents, not even on Jesus’ birthday. And no telling how much postseason football he’d miss.
Now, on Christmas Eve, his bladder falling all over itself in its eagerness to expel the glass of Jewish wine that he had consumed just to be polite, Verlin stood at the urinal in a restaurant that could be blown sky-high at any second, afraid to pull the zipper and expose his tremulous member to the diseases that common sense told him would be lying in wait, grinning like skulls, smirking like queers, in a squalid place such as this.
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br /> When he glimpsed the star through the dirty little window above his head, he took momentary heart. Reminding himself that the love and protection of the Christ Child was everywhere, even in this sitting target on this terrible night, he grabbed hold of Baby Jesus’ coattails and rode them to a calmer state of mind. Standing as far back from the urinal as the trajectory of his stream would allow, he went cautiously about his business, convinced that within the hour the worst Christmas Eve of his life would be over and he and Patsy would be nestled all snug in their bed in the comparative safety of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
No sense acting sissy about this, he thought. He sighed and permitted his sphincter to uncoil. At that instant, however, the star disappeared, obscured by a strange face pressed suddenly against the windowpane, a dark Semitic face that glowered maliciously beneath a tattered white headdress. Verlin stepped backward, spraying a bamboo wall with his water. “Terrorist!” he screamed, and then fainted dead away.
Nobody heard Verlin’s cry. Roland Abu Hadee and his wife, Nabila, were in the kitchen, the one washing dinner dishes, the other preparing coffee and dessert. At a dining room table, Patsy and Ellen Cherry were lost in conversation, this being their first opportunity to speak in private. Their day had been given over to shopping, Verlin and his credit cards in tow, and after baths and naps in their respective quarters, the long dinner party had begun.
The dinner celebration had more excuses than Buddy Winkler had boils. For openers, Christmas and Hanukkah were upon the land. Then, there was the occasion of it being Verlin and Patsy’s first visit to New York. Next, there was the recently received letter from the chief of police that granted the I & I the right to reopen for business; it had been ordered closed following the drive-by shootings in November. Last but not least, Spike Cohen had been released from the hospital on the previous day. It was expected, in fact, that Spike would join them at some point during dinner. He had been scheduled to spend the early half of the evening at a Hanukkah observance with his son, then catch a taxi to the I & I. However, midnight had arrived, and Spike had not. The consensus was that the Hanukkah fete must have worn him out and he’d been put to bed. They hoped he hadn’t hurt himself.