Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

by Tom Robbins

Seated on a spotless wooden bench that had known neither pigeon nor wino, Sissy and Julian stared at the clock, waiting for its minutes to chase its hours around—but it was a warm day and the minutes were walking.

  How many hours passed before the surgeon emerged from his operating room? Sissy and Julian didn't know. The clock could not be believed. When the surgeon finally did emerge, the Gitches rose to meet him. He addressed them with efficient gravity.

  “Well, he's not out of danger, but I think we can safely say he's going to make it. I'd be pretty surprised if he didn't. However, there is evidence of injury to the frontal lobe, and I have reason to fear that this injury may be permanent. The patient may never again function as a normal human being.”

  “Brain damage,” muttered Julian, shaking his head. Then, more distinctly, if somewhat hysterically, he asked, “You mean he's going to be a vegetable?”

  Sissy, to whom abnormal function was old hat, could not prevent her mind's eye from focusing upon certain apparitions: a monoclewearing asparagus, for example; turnip teeth clamped upon an ivory cigarette holder; a tomato made redder by Ripple; Veggie the Gay Cucumber. To drive these images from view, she re-examined her thumbs. They were sore and bruised, but essentially unimpaired. All those years she had underestimated their physical strength.

  “Vegetable?” repeated the doctor. He closed his eyes momentarily, as if he, too, were visited by strange hallucinations from the produce stalls. “Vegetable? I wouldn't say that, no. We won't ascertain the extent of the injury for some days, but there is a genuine possibility of severe and lasting behavioral defects. I wouldn't classify it in the vegetable category, however.” The surgeon didn't mention animal or mineral.

  Julian asked a few more questions. The answers added little to what had been said. Preparing to take his leave, the surgeon spoke to Sissy. “Mrs. Gitche, this hospital had no choice but to report this matter to the authorities. You might appreciate being informed that a warrant for your arrest has been prepared. If I were you, I'd go down to police headquarters right now and, er, negotiate. Considering the circumstances, the, ah, unusual and personal nature of the, er, instrument that caused the injury, well, you wouldn't want the press to get wind of this, I wouldn't think . . .”

  “Oh, we will, Doctor,” blurted Julian. “We'll go immediately.”

  Julian was fibbing. He wanted Sissy to turn herself in, but not immediately. “Let's go home first,” he said.

  “But why?” protested Sissy. “Hadn't we best just get on down there and get it over with?”

  “Sweetheart, you look dreadful. Dreadful. That old jumpsuit. It's even got blood on it. You haven't a trace of make-up. I want you to come home and let me help you into the dress I bought you, the party dress, the low-cut one. And make yourself up. You're a beautiful woman and there's no harm in taking advantage of it. We'll let the authorities know we're citizens of some standing. It's important to impress them. Cops are just as susceptible to physical charm as any other men. Turn them on a bit, if that's what it takes. It'll go easier for you. Here, you wait here. I'll duck into the gift shop” (They were now in the hospital lobby) “and get you some rouge. You never wear it, and you're looking pale.” Julian headed for the cosmetics counter, where he found the selection extensive.

  There is an animal called the water mongoose. It inhabits the swamps of Asia. The water mongoose has one grand trick up its sleeve (although up its sleeve is not exactly where the trick is at). It can distend its anal orifice until it (the anal orifice) looks like a ripe red fruit. Then the water mongoose stands very, very still. Sooner or later, a bird will come along and start to peck the “fruit.” Whereupon the water mongoose whirls around rapidly and eats the bird. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues could find a parable in that, if it wanted to—but that might be too far-fetched.

  85.

  CARNIVAL SEASON REARS ITS MAD, masked head just before Ash Wednesday, the austere first day of the Roman Catholic forty-day Lenten fast. Carnival, whether lasting three days, as it does in most places, or two weeks, as it does in a few looser locales, culminates on Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, with particularly riotous merrymaking.

  The commonly accepted view is that carnival originated as a final fling on the part of good Christians before they commenced their forty days of fasting and penitence in preparation for Easter. It is written in encyclopedias and taught in universities that the word carnival is derived from the Latin carne levare, meaning “the putting away of flesh.” Thus, it is thought to refer to some festive, last-minute, pre-Lenten carnivorousness, for during Lent none of the faithful may eat meat.

  Poppycock. Balderdash. And flapdoodle. In other words, bullshit.

  The carnival celebrated in Catholic lands is actually an adaptation of an ancient pagan whoopdedoohoo, the Festival of Dionysus, which in turn was adapted from the still older Haloa and Thesmophoria, two of the fertility festivals of the mother goddess Demeter.

  (In Classical Greece, at the time when paternal rule began to ace out maternal, newcomer Dionysus was elevated to the Olympic Council, replacing the hearth goddess, Hestia, and taking over Demeter's festivals. For untold thousands of years, there had been no male deities in Europe. Dionysus, incidentally, was originally associated with psychedelic mushrooms, first the Amanita muscaria and later the smoother, more delightful Psilocybe. As the paternalistic Christian influence gained power, Dionysus was purged of his mushroom practices and was pronounced the god of wine. The Church, and the political and business interests who found Christianity a perfect front, much preferred the masses to use booze, which depresses the senses, instead of mushrooms, which illuminate them, just as they preferred that the aggressive logic of the paternal stereotype supplant the loving grace of maternalism. If kissing is man's greatest invention, then fermentation and patriarchy compete with the domestication of animals for the distinction of being man's worst folly, and no doubt the three combined long ago, the one growing out of the others, to foster civilization and lead Western humanity to its present state of decline. Cha cha cha.)

  In truth, the word carnival is derived from carrus navalis, “cart of the sea.” This was a boat-shaped vehicle on wheels used in the processions of Dionysus, and from which all kinds of witty and lust-inducing songs were sung. These ship carts, carri navales, making reference as they did to Dionysus' fabled underwater retreat in the grottos of the sea goddess, Thetis, from which he emerged at festival time, were accompanied by musicians and dancers of both sexes, skimpily clad or nude. They continued to be pulled through the streets in European festivals until the later Middle Ages, and today have their less nautical and less naughty counterparts in Mardi Gras floats.

  The pagan festivals were deeply entrenched in the hearts and minds of the people, and they weren't inclined to give them up. Substitute the cross of guilt and suffering for the sea cart of joy and fecundity? Somehow that didn't seem like an A-1 good deal. They ran it up a flagpole and only a few paranoiacs and uncontrolled spastics saluted it. So the Church shrewdly compromised. It permitted carnival, but conspired to give it Christian significance, gradually succeeding in divorcing it from carefree fertility and associating it instead with self-denial and death (albeit, at three days, the shortest death in history, according to the Guinness Book of World Records— and as Jesus himself once said, “You're either for us or a Guinness").

  Reader, the foregoing information concerning carnival is presented here merely as an example of the sort of facts uncovered by Dr. Robbins during his investigation of paganism. If Sissy was content to sit and think about the meaning of her pagan heritage, as described by the Chink, if she was as passive as a baked turkey in her consideration of the pagan potential in modern America (again, as suggested by the Chink), then Dr. Robbins took a more active approach. In the days since he had called in well at the Goldman Clinic, he had engaged in research. Unbiased data about our pagan past was not extensive—our Christian leadership had seen to that—but Dr. Robbins found enough to fascinate him. He had, as a matter
of fact, just returned from a profitable morning of scholarship in the public library when his telephone broke a long silence, shrieking from its stationary pedestal as if it thought itself a flashy car being driven at high speeds over back-country roads. Well, even telephones can dream, can't they?

  It was Sissy calling. She was upset. In distress. She had just ditched Julian at St. Vincent's Hospital and must see Dr. Robbins at once.

  Naturally, Robbins was willing, but he pressed for further details. So Sissy blabbed the whole bloody thing.

  “My, my,” said Dr. Robbins. “My oh my. This is bad, this is very bad, but you mustn't think of it as a razor held to the Dali's mustache of your life. Violence stinks, no matter which end of it you're on. But now and then there's nothing left to do but hit the other person over the head with a frying pan. Sometimes people are just begging for that frypan, and if we weaken for a moment and honor their request, we should regard it as impulsive philanthropy, which we aren't in any position to afford, but shouldn't regret it too loudly lest we spoil the purity of the deed.

  “Now. I don't really want you coming to my place, in case the cops trace you here. I've got half a kilo of grass stashed here, not to mention a couple of other embarrassing odds and ends. So, tell you what we can do. We'll meet at six this evening in my aunt's house in Passaic, New Jersey. My aunt's away and I have the keys. A safer place you couldn't find. You can get to Passaic, can't you? It's only twenty minutes from Manhattan. Here's my aunt's address.

  “Say, Sissy, by the way. Did you know that Nijinsky once played tennis in Passaic, New Jersey? He did. Only time he played tennis in his life. And the only historical event I would like to have filmed. Nijinsky playing tennis in Passaic, New Jersey. Wow! Now that'd be a movie fit to be shown to Jesus, Dionysus and Demeter.”

  86.

  AFTER TALKING WITH DR. ROBBINS, Sissy felt better—but not much. To the knapsack of her guilt was now added another rock, this one flecked with running-out-on-Julian.

  “Maybe it's just that my perspective is wrong,” ventured Sissy. She thought that she would see if there wasn't some positive way to view her actions. It might take time (ah, time!) to arrive at such a vantage point, however, and urgency was running up her leg like a mouse.

  After that thumping she'd given the Countess, the authorities would say she was crazy for sure. And one thing she did not want, could not tolerate, was to be committed to the Goldman Clinic or its state-funded equivalent. She felt guilt, she felt sorrow, shame and confusion, but she did not feel that she owed society any accounting for her behavior, as bad as her behavior might have been. Society had never looked upon her with favor. It had been eager to write her off when she was just a little girl. Society might have institutionalized her way back then if she had cooperated. Society had neither liked her nor believed in her, but luckily she had liked herself and believed in herself, and although she recognized that she had floundered in recent years, erred in recent hours, she still liked and believed, and the reckoning she must make was with herself, not with society, especially not with a society that was willing to put a matter as delicate as this in the kitten-crusher hands of the police.

  Thus, Sissy Hankshaw Gitche, a self-recognized ongoing system of uncommon abilities and unexpected vices, headed for New Jersey; for options, alternatives, choices. And didn't it feel sweet to be up to her armpits in traffic again, to be dancing cheek to cheek with traffic, to be charming the deadly snake of traffic, to be sticking her thumb into the pie of traffic, Oh she could bouncy-wouncy baby Volkswagens on her knees and suck on Italian racing cars just to freshen her breath, traffic was her element, her medium, the vocabulary from which she snatched the words of her poem, Oh didn't her hands come back to life with a squeal! and wasn't it swee-eet?

  So happy was Sissy to pick that conservative blue Econoline van out of the throng on Canal Street and draw it to her as if on a string that she failed to look over its driver until she was seated and he was stomping the gas-feed. It was with a sense of disgust at her own failure that she scrutinized his sweaty brow, his smug, hot leer, his eyes so starved for erogenous scenery that they did not register her thumbs. Her heart sank another twenty fathoms when she saw his gun and his knife.

  87.

  LAWS, it is said, are for protection of the people. It's unfortunate that there are no statistics on the number of lives that are clobbered yearly as a result of laws: outmoded laws; laws that found their way onto the books as a result of ignorance, hysteria or political haymaking; antilife laws; biased laws; laws that pretend that reality is fixed and nature is definable; laws that deny people the right to refuse protection. A survey such as that could keep a dozen dull sociologists out of mischief for months. (Ford Foundation, are you reading this book?)

  The first laws prohibiting hitchhiking were enacted in New Jersey in the 1920s to keep city-bred flapper freeloaders away from selected resorts and rural paradises. New Jersey remains one of two states (Hawaii, the other) where hitchhiking is both completely illegal and the law strictly enforced. It was because of the Jersey ban, and the toughness of its state patrol, that Sissy had selected the blue van. She was on Canal Street, near the entrance to the West Side Highway. She had hoped to get a ride up the West Side Highway and over the George Washington Bridge, putting her as close as possible to Passaic, keeping her hitching—as much as she capital-A Adored it!—to a minimum once in Jersey. The blue van had Jersey plates. That's why she chose it.

  It had been a mutual choice, for the blue van's driver had spotted Sissy a block away and had manuevered into the curb lane. He had started talking even before he braked, and once Sissy was aboard he was rapping away at such an amphetamine clip that had he died at that moment the undertaker would have had to beat his tongue to death with a stick.

  He was also unzipping his pants.

  “I'm going to give it to you like you've never had it before. Oh, you didn't know it could be this good. You're gonna like it. You're gonna like it. You're gonna like it so good. You're gonna love it so much you're gonna cry. You're gonna cry and cry. Do you like to cry? Do you like it when it hurts a little bit? Whatever happens to you, it'll be worth it. The way I'm gonna give it to you, it'll be worth anything. Everything. Go ahead and cry if you want to. I like it when women cry. It means they appreciate me.” Etc., etc.

  The van pulled off Canal, down a deadend street between warehouses. In the rear of the vehicle was a soiled mattress.

  By then, the driver had his organ out in the late afternoon sunlight. It was erect and of Kentucky Derby proportions.

  With a swift swoosh that gave the June air bad memories of winter, Sissy's left thumb came down hard on the penis top, nearly cleaving it to the root. The driver howled. His finger fumbled for gun trigger. Before he could squeeze it, however, the thumb splatted between his eyes. Twice. Three times. He lost control of the van. It lumbered into a street lamp, giving both van and lamppost a taste of what it's like to be organic.

  Sissy lept from the vehicle and ran. Four or five blocks away, out of breath but safe in the neon aura of a just-closing working man's luncheonette, she stopped to rest. The tears the rapist had longed for made their appearance, heavy and hot, just the way he would have liked them. The thought of it made her stop crying.

  She examined her thumb. Fresh bruises, like blue jellyfish, were floating lazily to the surface. Sore muscles twitched mechanically, as if typing an essay: “The Thumb As Weapon.”

  “Twice in one day,” Sissy sobbed. “Twice in one day.”

  Abruptly, the sobbing ceased. With a look of determination that could have served as the dust jacket for any number of how-to-succeed manuals, Sissy announced in a clear, hard voice, “Okay! If they want me normal, then normal, by God, is what they're gonna get!”

  She hailed a taxi. Rode uptown to the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Bought a one-way ticket to Richmond, Virginia.

  As the southbound Greyhound hissed through the Jersey flats, she recalled that several centuries ago this f
etid fairyland of oil refineries had been jumping with whooping cranes.

  88.

  THIS NOVEL now has as many chapters as a piano has keys (Eat your hearts out, ye writers of ukuleles and piccolos!), and in point of fact it would be but moderately trite to label this the “piano chapter.” For as Chapter 88 rears its hastily typed head, Julian Gitche is sponging dried Countess blood from the keyboard of his white baby grand, sponging, gulping Scotch and going slightly bananas wondering what has happened to his wife.

  And up in Passaic, New Jersey, where Nijinsky once played tennis in ballet slippers, there was another piano, this one a battered old upright in the parlor of an aunt. And there, another man was puzzling where Sissy might be.

  Dr. Robbins didn't play the piano. In order to distract his thoughts from the fact of Sissy's lateness (if one's philosophy of time permits one to accept as facts such notions as late or early), he toked on reefers and outlined a movie. Not a movie of Nijinsky leaping twenty-five feet in the air trying to backhand a lob in Passaic, New Jersey: it was too “late” for that, time and brain being the odd couple they are. No, Dr. Robbins was thinking how it might be interesting to make a film from Adelle Davis's perennial best seller, Let's Eat Right to Keep Fit.

  Representing a classic confrontation between good and evil—in this case, nutrition versus unhealthy diet—the story had definite box office appeal. The role of the hero, Protein, probably should be filled by big Jim Brown, although Burt Reynolds undoubtedly would pull strings to try to get the part. Sunny Doris Day would be a clear choice to play the heroine, Vitamin C, and Orson Welles, oozing saturated fatty acids from the pits of his flesh, could win an Oscar for his interpretation of the villainous Cholesterol. The film might begin on a stormy night in the central nervous system. Alarmed, the ever-watchful pituitary gland dispatches a couple of trusted hormones with a message for the adrenals. Even though it's all downstream, the going is rough because of boulders of white sugar and passageways dangerously narrowed due to atherosclerosis. Suddenly . . .