He looked at her, confused. Memory loss! What memory loss was she referring to? When?
“You’re still my dreamboat,” she said. “But grow up. And get help.”
The next morning, three satyrs knocked on his door and announced that they had gone ahead with the orgy on their own, it had been va-va-va-voom zing-zing-zing all night and now the orgy had recessed for vomiting and baths and would resume at ten-thirty with a wild-boar brunch. They cried, “Sixteen young virgins are arriving from Macedonia, the tenderest and prettiest ones! Fresh as dewdrops on spring roses! Shy and freckled and peach-soft skin! Big brown eyes and long black hair! Or blonde! Take your pick!” Despite the long night of partying, they hopped around on their hairy legs, their goat feet tapping, their eyes burning diamond-bright, their long ears twitching. Satyrs know no sexual restraint except that imposed by their natural cowardice—they are terrified of confrontation, darkness, nonelective surgery, loud noises, and long-term commitments; but once liquored up, they can go for days, humping like bunnies. Dionysus winced at the odor of their musk. “Look. Guys—short-term, I’d love to join you, but I got to think long-term now. I’ve got a mortality problem I’ve got to deal with.”
That morning, he flew to Mount Olympus to visit Zeus, and instead of forty minutes, the trip took four hours; Air Parnassus bumped him off the first flight—“I’m a god!” he cried, but the woman pointed out that his deity card had expired the day before and put him on standby, and finally he got the last available seat on the four-fifteen, a middle seat in the last row, next to a fat man who perspired heavily and who asked him what line of work he was in. “Wine,” said Dionysus. “Oh,” said the fat man, “that’s a coincidence. I’m in the beer business.” He seemed to think that beer and wine were closely allied, like cheese and crackers, or philosophy and philately. Dionysus took a cab to the temple, where Zeus kept him waiting another hour. When Dionysus finally was ushered into the sacred office, Zeus—his own dad!—shook his hand stiffly, smiled officially, and said, “I’ve decided to make a change. Latromis is going to become the god of wine, and you’re going to be the chairman of wine. He’ll do the revels and orgies and lie around with the nubile young women and you can form a wine board, organize wine programs, formulate wine goals, that sort of thing. Maximize wine. Whatever. And by the way, congratulations on turning fifty. I meant to send a card, but anyway, here’s your birthday presents.” He pointed toward a marble pedestal.
There was a sack of fruit such as you’d buy in a supermarket, and a pound of blue cheese, and a T-shirt with a picture of a cow saying “Fly Me to the Moon,” and a photograph of Zeus in a silver frame, signed, “Yours sincerely, Zeus,” as if Dionysus were only a fan.
“Dad,” he said. “Why am I fifty? Why did my divinity expire? You never told me this would happen.”
Zeus feigned surprise. “You? What are you talking about? You still look pretty darned divine to me!” he said, chuckling in a dry, insincere way as he steered Dionysus to the door. “But if you think there’s a problem, I’ll look into it. First thing next week. I’ll get back to you,” he said. “Bye!”
It was a bad time for a guy who had been a god, now suddenly mortified, degraded, pitied, and abandoned, and Dionysus thought he would drop in at the orgy and see how it was going. It was going wonderfully! An all-girl band played in the nude, including a fabulous ram’s-hornist and a blues harpist who plucked handfuls of strings and cried “Oh yes! yes!,” and a naked lady poet leaped around and shouted at Dionysus—O your body my body somebody and the liquid light leaping into the howling arroyos of the boyish soul, you yoyo!—and Janis Idol the pop star and blonde strumpet was lurking in the corner of the room, throwing smoldering looks over her shoulder, and nubility was in full flower and pliancy and suppleness and some women are meant to be bare-breasted, that’s all, and a young virgin named Grace Huggins turned out to be not only supple and pliant and delicious but also a tremendous Ping-Pong player, and after long slow dizzying triumphant love she beat him two out of three games, her sarcastic young breasts bouncing, faking him out, as her topspin serve rocketed off the table and her backhand spinners hooked the corners and her slop shots handcuffed him with their little dips and flutters, and then more love, and some wine, and love again, and she looked up at him dreamily and said, “Oh wow,” and her simple sincere Oh wow was what cured his blues. To make love and hear a woman say “Oh wow”—it was all a fifty-year-old needed, to know that he was still impressive. “I love when you look over your left shoulder like that,” she whispered. Dionysus said, “Thanks, babe,” and reached for a glass and drank it down, and the next he knew, she was gone, the afternoon sun blazed down, he was crawling buck-naked through a cornfield with the glass in his hand, his head felt like a lag bolt was screwed in the side of it, and overhead, immense black buzzards slowly circled, shrieking. Something dangled from his mouth that felt like the tail of a small rodent. Just the same, he felt no regret. Her Oh wow was worth it. He slumped down in the dirt and the sharp stones, his poor old body hurting, his back raked with scratches, his lips dry and crusty, the taste of sorrow in his mouth—and yet, he thought…and yet. Oh wow.
When he dragged himself home, Ariadne took one look and gave him an ultimatum: “Get help or get out.”
He tried to explain. “Life is a celebration,” he whispered, his cracked lips hurting. “In order to grow, we need to enjoy who we are. In order to get to tomorrow, we have to fully enjoy today.”
“Tell it to a therapist,” she said.
Theros, the Muse of caring, ran a treatment program on Mount Aesculapius especially for gods, demigods, and ex-gods, and when Dionysus walked in and sat down on her couch, she said, “I’m not surprised one bit to see you. Do you want to know why?”
He did not. He was tired of the knowingness of women.
Theros had a tight mouth and big legs. She crossed them, licked her lips, and opened her notebook. She said, “Tell me about your parents.”
“You know about my parents,” he said. “Dad was God, of course. Zeus. Fell in love with Mom and then his wife Hera got jealous and came to Mom in disguise and said, Hey, congratulations, but if you want a really good time, tell him to bring his thunderbolts, it’s a real charge! So Mom did, and it was too much—she burst into flames. But Dad snatched me up from her burning body—out of the ashes—and sewed me up in his thigh and I spent my prenatal period there, next to his gonads.
“My nurse was Mom’s sister Ino, who Hera drove mad so Ino ran around in a frenzy, spit dripping from her lips, a terrible babysitter, and she jumped off a cliff into the sea. Then Hera had me torn into shreds and boiled in a cauldron. I was rescued by my grandma, but death and destruction made a big impression on me. Maybe that’s why I invented wine, as an escape from the violent disapproval of my father’s wife. I don’t know. I often have dreams in which I have been locked in a chest with my mother and put out to sea and we drift for months, then she dies. I lie in the dark, starving, mad, next to her dead body, rolling on the ocean waves, and then I am found by kindly fisher folk and brought to a green island paradise where I run naked in the woods, and one day, wild swine with bloodstained tusks and tiny red eyes come charging at me through the tall booji grass and I run and run and run, panic-stricken, and fall off the edge of the mile-high cliff and wake up soaked with sweat, trembling, the sheet wound around my neck.”
“What kind of chest?”
“You know. A sort of trunk,” he said.
She squinted and pursed her lips. “With drawers?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Like a cabinet or cupboard?”
“No, I don’t think so. I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know?”
This was the maddening thing about Theros, he discovered: you told her a great story and she got wrapped up in one dumb little detail, like when you described your first orgy, even though the whole point of the story was mindless ecstatic sex, she leaned forward, pencil in hand, and said,
“Let’s go back to those little smoked-herring sandwiches. Why herring? And why curried herring?” until you groaned with frustration, remembering that pile of glistening naked young bodies, that ocean of passion, and she said, “And those celery sticks with cream-cheese spread in them. Were there pimentos in those, too?” As a therapist, she was an awful bore.
“As I understand wild revelry, it is a celebration of life,” Dionysus told Theros, patiently. “Before we can create new life, we need to enjoy the life we have and to defeat sullenness and lethargy and depression, the withering of the spirit. So we take our treasure and spend it lavishly, inspiring ourselves with happiness, we get drunk, we sing, we fling food at each other, and the next week the fields grow rich, fertilized by wild song, and the grain outlasts the heat and drought of the Dog Star, and the land pours out a bounty of wheat and corn. And from this, we make more beer and whiskey.”
“You’re avoiding mentioning the celery sticks,” she said. “Why?”
Dionysus wearied of therapy. His spirit sank every day as the appointment approached. He hated sitting in that dim dry room and trying to be a patient, trying to feel needy, when, in fact, his life seemed to him powerful, thrusting forward, drawn by a powerful wind. So one day he quit. “I don’t have you down for next week,” she said. “Good,” he replied. He kissed her goodbye on the lips, a lingering kiss to give her something to think about.
Instead of therapy, he tried a new brand of bran flakes, which included flecks of birch boughs. He did push-ups and he climbed chairs. His hair improved slightly, when he switched to a shampoo with extra oil to compensate for not attending orgies.
And he cut down on wine, limiting himself to only the best varieties and only on special occasions. No more glugging, just sipping. And no more young Macedonian women.
It was a dreary business, middle age. He missed those nymphs, doggone it, and even the satyrs with their hairy legs and odor of rut. Say what you will, they are the right sort of disreputable people, and when you drape your arm around them and all sing “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie,” those nymphs and satyrs sing the dirtiest verses loud, no sheepish looks as if Mom might be watching, they let the lust and gluttony and hairy grunting beast of bad taste hang out all the way, and now, as world chairman of wine, he found himself more and more among people with the emotional range of Lucite, earnest men indistinguishable from other earnest men, serious women who shrank from any sort of playfulness, people who said How pleasant to see you when there was not a crumb of pleasure within a hundred feet. He had lived thousands and thousands of years, but it wasn’t until he reached the age of fifty that he realized how desolate life could be.
“How are you?” Ariadne asked him.
“I am fine,” he said.
“We’re having the Whipples over tonight,” she said. “And the Snaffles. And Jim and Judy Woofle.” Dreadful people, all of them, people who could bore the shoes right off you. Their idea of a big time was to sit around and complain about schools and traffic congestion. “Good,” he said, “I’m looking forward to it. That’ll be real fun.” In reduced circumstances, one must show generosity and elegance of spirit, he knew. He tried to smile. He stared out the window. Long stone houses lay half-hidden back among the olive and fruit trees across the sweep of clipped sward, and he could see sunlight flickering on distant pools in which he had swum at midnight, naked, the pool crowded with happy women splashing and laughing—there had never been a bad party for him—always there had been boring men, yes, with voices like handsaws, but the young women turned instinctively toward him when he rose dripping from the pool and the party rose to a higher pitch and the tide of music and laughter rose and carried the celebrants off the stony shoals of life and career and family, even sometimes the boring men, and for all the parties he had enjoyed, he wanted more, many many more.
He trudged into his study and plopped down at the desk. Piles of work lay there, a sheaf of papers relating to the upcoming conference on Meeting the Wine Needs of the Nineties and a sixteen-page speech on "Promoting the Total Wine Experience” that he himself must stand at a dais and deliver the following day, a real stink bomb. There was a stack of bills, from the dentist, the phone company, the chiropractor, and a curt reminder that he owed four hundred drachmas for a shipment of olive oil.
Dionysus picked up his pen. “Dear Hatchet Face,” he wrote in a bold hand. “You have some nerve demanding payment for a jar of rancid oil that made me smell like an aging buffalo and that had so much grit in it as to make concupiscence an uphill climb.”
He balled the page up and flung it toward the waste-basket and cried out as the ball fell short. After thousands and thousands of years without pain of any sort, now, at the age of fifty, he had a backache.
BUDDY THE LEPER
y mother believed that if you go out of your way to be friendly to people, they will take a liking to you, but this philosophy did not work for me, because I was a leper. I contracted the dread disease at the age of twelve, living with my parents, Pastor and Mrs. Sorenson, in the tiny village of Masabam in the African Congo, a collection of mud-and-plywood huts with corrugated tin roofs clustered around our white three-bedroom rambler with a big green lawn and patio and basketball hoop on the garage. My mother and dad were Methodist missionaries, and Dad also played saxophone in a dance band called The Whiteman Orchestra that performed for large safari groups and at the Ramada Masada Inn. During his twelve years in Africa, Dad had moved up the missionary ladder and become a regional coordinator of missions, and we could have lived in the city where his office was, but Dad wanted me to have the benefit of a small-town upbringing, the sort he had had in South Dakota. Instead, I caught leprosy.
I caught it from using a toilet in a bus depot. Mom and I were on our way to the witch dentist, whose office was a hundred miles from Masabam. Mom was terrified of drills and needles, and she found that the witch dentist, who sprinkled a circle of sand around you and put pebbles in your mouth and then danced around shaking rattles and crying “O-hi-yeeeeee, O-hi-yeeeee,” actually did a better job of preventative dentistry than dentists in the States. We traveled to see him for our six-month checkups, riding on a bus full of Africans with crates of chickens and ducks, black mamas packed in with their babies, bouncing around the mud roads, and when we made a rest stop, all of the others simply made a beeline for the bushes.
I needed to go, bad, and was about to squat by a tree when Mom cried, “No! Buddy! We have to set an example! Use the toilet in the depot!” The depot was a long, low, poorly ventilated shack that stank of disease and decay, but Mom insisted, so I went, and I picked up the leprosy. From a sense of Methodist obligation, from the toilet seat. They say you can’t get it from a toilet seat, but I’d like to see them say it to me. I got it. Mom was spared because she has a bladder of steel.
It was strange, of course, to live in such a nice clean house as ours and be a leper. Mom and Dad worked hard to make our home as nice as any in the States—we had a beautiful ceramic-tile shower and a powerful toilet, a lovely breakfast nook, a carpeted living room and dining room with a chandelier, a new piano, Mom’s collection of salt shakers, a coffee table with Time and Life and The Family of Man on it—but there I was, a leper in the ointment. In fact, Dad couldn’t believe it was leprosy, he thought it must be a nutrition problem, and then after vitamins failed to clear it up, he thought it was eczema and sent for creams and gels, and then he decided it was psychosomatic. “We’ll get you treatment, Buddy,” he promised, and he tried, but psychiatry was primitive in the Congo at that time. The common treatment for an adolescent boy was to send him into the bush alone to hunt a lion.
“No, he’s not ready,” Dad told the headshrinker. “He’s only twelve.”
“He’s a big tall boy and he’ll never be ready unless you’re willing to let go of the strings and let him grow up,” the shrinker replied. He was squatting in front of our coffee table, a tiny jet-black man with paint daubed on his chest and red chalk dust in his hair.
“He’s terrified of the jungle,” said Dad. “And he’s never harmed a living creature in his life. He’ll die if we send him out there.”
“He’ll die if you keep sheltering him as if he were a child. A boy has to become a man. That’s the problem with you Americans. You shrink from necessary pains. You want life to be like television.” The shrinker looked down at the plate of cheese and crackers that Mom had set out. He took a slice of mild cheddar on a Hi-Ho. “We’ll give him a spear and a knife, a sack of dried fruit, and we’ll set him down in the lion blind, next to the watering hole. He will wait there for the lion, and if the lion comes, the boy will try to kill him. Maybe he will, or maybe the lion will run away, or maybe the lion won’t come at all and the boy will only sit for a week and wait. But in that week he will become a man. This is the truth. I have spoken. As for the leprosy, there are drugs that keep it under control very nicely.” And he got up, bowed, and left.
So my dad put me on antileprosy drugs, which handled it okay. Nevertheless, as a leper, I was shunned in the village and had to remain at home. I sat in my bedroom with the dark-green-plaid wallpaper and maple desk and bullfighter poster and read magazines and played solo Parcheesi and listened to the phonograph. Mom was a big Doris Day fan and I listened to “Que Será Será (Whatever Will Be, Will Be)” a thousand times, and I read National Geographic articles about pygmies and elephants, though the pygmies were only five hundred feet away.
“I think humor is so very important, Buddy,” Mom told me. “It’s so crucial to be lighthearted. Don’t let this get you down. I’d like to hear you laugh more.” She told me jokes but Mom couldn’t tell a joke well and kept telling the same one. It was about a dog who went in a bar and ordered a vodka sour.
One day, I found a man sitting on our patio whose body was covered with open putrid sores. I called for Mom to come. His name was Joe, he told us, he was in agony, but he was used to it. He begged for bread. Mom went in and made him a sandwich.
The Book of Guys Page 6