Call Me Ishtar

by Rhoda Lerman

  Ishtar placed a talent of silver in each burned eye since she had no smaller change and covered his tortured face with the poster. From her Burdine’s shopping bag she drew a bundle wrapped in the Miami Herald Comic Section. She unwrapped her furca, laid it in her lap and traced tenderly the copper of the cursive e she knew so well, then folded the Comic Section into a colorful pyramid hat, Mary Worth at the peak, and tucked her long hair neatly under it. She often forgot and ruined her curls in storms. Twisting her carnelian mouth at the sky, she cupped her breasts, the furca flashed blue arcs and she commanded El, “Flood. Small.”

  Around her a torrential rain sluiced suddenly through the park. The older policeman, cursing, pulled the blanket from the boy and reversing it, bloody side up, tented it over his head. The Youth for Christ boys and girls, except for the one at the footlights, scrambled to a bright mustard school bus. Its rubber doors snapped closed over the sounds of the shrill voices singing. Ishtar liked the weaving of the words and allowed herself a moment to listen. “The prettiest girl I ever saw. The prettiest girl I ever saw was sipping cider …” Blood and semen washed into the sidewalk cracks. Beyond the Bandshell, the royal palms bowed to the ground under the wind. Ishtar walked to them. A chorus of whistling palm fronds swept the ground before her feet in terror. And she spoke out of the whirlwind.

  “Praise Ishtar, the most awesome of Goddesses, I am come back.”

  The palm fronds whistled.

  “I am the Gleaming One, the Torch of Heaven, the Light of All Peoples.”

  Soft amber tears ran across her cheekbones and dropping to the grass, hardened into stones. “The heavens weep. I am unknown, unloved and my children are lost. The singer pours his wasted semen into empty skies. The suicide pours his blood into barren soil.

  Her face contorted, terrible in anger, she wrenched the backrest from a bench and drummed it mightily again and again into the seat.

  “Praise Ishtar. I am the Mother. Damn you with your nightsticks, your crumbling tablets, your wooden crosses. My children are sick on your stale wafers and your false wines and your Thou Shalt Nots! They are all bad hash, children. It is Mother you should eat. You hear me? Mother!”

  She cupped her breasts with trembling hands. The furca flashed blue in the shopping bag. On Biscayne Boulevard the drawbridge at First Street shot up precisely as the school bus with its singing children reached it and the bus smashed into the steely tendril section over the river, hovered in its web, then plunged forward in the Miami River.

  “They are all bad hash!” she screamed to the children bubbling in the sewage. “It is Mother you should eat.”

  Ishtar collapsed on the splintered bench. The furca sizzled as it cooled in the rain. She ended the rains. The palms stood straight; the fronds calmed themselves. The sun was hot copper innocent in the blue sky. Ishtar rent her comic pyramid hat, lamenting the children drowned and the claw footed bench broken and shredded the papers of her hat into long kitetails. She threw the kitetails over the silent face of Biscayne Bay. They drifted north.

  Ishtar noted her needs on her shopping list. The afternoon news attributed the bus disaster to a freak electrical storm. Although Ishtar acknowledged the accuracy of the word disaster, the wrong turning of the Star, the word freak deeply offended her. She flew north that night, the shopping list clutched, like the branch of peace, in the beak of her mouth. She would find an earthly woman who tended toward the divine and was more in keeping with the culture. And she would teach her divinity. And then she would rest. Shape-changing always drained her.

  Ishtar’s Shopping List

  I need a beautiful woman.

  I need a band for music.

  I need a son and/or lover.

  I do not need a son or a lover.

  I need three-by-five cards.

  I need rubber bands.

  I need new long-life batteries for my furca.

  I do not need to, but I would like to get laid.

  I need some new underwear.

  I need to follow the Thruway to Exit 39.

  The girl, Colleen, worked behind a counter in a drugstore in Miami. She wore a horsetail and a pink mini-skirt. Her boyfriend was in the courtroom.

  “I saw Jim Morrison of the Doors,” she said. “And he pulled down his pants.”

  “How far?”

  “To a point midway between—between his waist and his knees.”

  “Would you care to describe what you saw?”

  “Oh, no!” The horsetail shook, the shoulders shook and tears ran over her clear white cheeks. Never trust a girl who claims she is pure. “He put-put his hand on it.”

  The jury caught its composite breath.

  “And, and he said an unusual word beginning with an f.”

  “Indecent exposure,” the judge said, calling a hasty recess. Colleen’s boyfriend escorted her from the chambers, comforting her.

  It is not difficult to understand why a rock star, having reached the limits of adoration among the people, will then offer himself to the world as an all-purpose God.

  And Ra spoke. “I even I had union with my clenched hand; I joined myself in an embrace with my shadow. I poured my seed into my mouth, my own. I sent forth issue. I wept over them and there came into being men and women from the tears.”

  One might even speculate as to whether men did not create the larger forms of society after they despaired of being able, by magic manipulation and many pulls of their genitals, to bear children. Childbirth is the last stronghold.

  “Do you experience the same reactions at your concerts that you did at least until a year ago—girls going crazy, et cetera? Or is it all a myth?”

  Morrison: “You know, that’s the funniest thing. Sometimes it happens and when it does, it’s all very mythical and strange. It just seems to happen out of some ancient ritual that somehow people have buried in their minds. At other times it just seems like a big put-on by the audience, which is very sad, a send-up when they pretend to be all jazzed over what you’re doing and they’re actually just doing it to be funny and that’s very … but sometimes a very strange thing happens. The music or the night is just right and you hit a peak that’s so heavy that people just can’t help kind of becoming a herd, a strange, ancient crowd celebration. But lately I think … I don’t know, ah, shit, I haven’t performed in a long time.”

  Morrison exposed himself in Miami and died in a bathtub in England.

  “In Australia, for example, each time we’d arrive at an airport, it was as if De Gaulle had landed, or, better yet, the Messiah. The Beatles had come. The routes were lined solidly with people; cripples threw away their sticks; sick people rushed up to the car as if a touch from one of the Beatles would make them well again; old women stood watching with their grandchildren, and as we’d pass by, I could see the look on their faces. It was as if some Savior had arrived and people were happy and relieved that things were going to be better now.”

  “What is your belief in God?” the reporters asked Dylan.

  Dylan replied: “Well, first of all, God is a woman. We all know that. Well, you take it from there.”

  When the trial resumed, Miami Police Officer R. E. Miller, who was patrolling at the concert, testified that Morrison pulled down his dark leather pants to his thighs and exposed his testes for fifteen seconds. Miller said he did not observe any underwear and could not tell whether or not the pants were down only in front.

  “Morrison took his genitals in his hands and shook them. He took his shirt and threw it into the audience. I did not observe any underwear at any time.”

  “What did Mr. Morrison do then?”

  “I observed Mr. Morrison pulling up his pants and then I observed him on his knees in front of another male member of the group. I further observed a white female on the stage with Morrison, after his exposure, and he had his arms around her and was hugging her.”

  And she handed him an apple and got him in the bathtub in England, later. She chose him.

  4

>   WHEN THE MORNING STAR ROSE OVER THE BITTERSWEET DRUMLINS and apple groves of Syracuse, where she had been going, Ishtar stood on the median of a superhighway, her nostrils dilating at the pungency of gasoline, rotting apples and manure. She waved an arm gracefully and flagged down a bakery truck, climbed aboard displaying her feathers, and exchanged her favors for four dozen packages of Hostess Cupcakes and Hostess Twinkies. Ishtar and the laughing African who smelled wonderfully of lemon and was much more satisfying than the stone phalli at Carnac, chuckled at sunup. The African shoved Twinkies into Hostesses and licked the spilt creme of the centers from Ishtar’s fingers. Ishtar loved his brown fingers and perfect pink-mooned nails. He pleased her greatly. He drove her to a steel and glass supermarket where she would fill her shopping list and waved good-by energetically from the cab of his happy truck.

  There was a parodic sense of Eleusis about the shopping plaza, rising as it did from a vast concrete apron beneath a spread of drumlins. A fountain sprayed in the center of the apron; beribboned poles of light encircled it; bushels of tomatoes, corn, piles of watermelons and potted plants were stacked, like first fruits, on wooden plank ziggurats. The neon pine tree swinging in the light breeze pleased Ishtar. She loaded a shopping basket with Cupcakes and Twinkies and pushed it into the supermarket. The manager watched threateningly from his glassed cubicle. She touched her breasts slyly and muttered: “Your member shall torment you until sunset.” Then she built a perfect pyramid of Cupcakes in the shopping cart and a corbelled dome of Twinkies on the end of a checkout counter. Finished, she tied an apple green paper hostess apron around her slim waist. Her woman with the band and the boy would be in soon.

  “Hey, Lady,” the squirming manager finally rasped at her from his divider. “You got authority?”

  Ishtar unfolded a green puffed paper hat on which she had inscribed in gold ink hostess and placed it carefully on her curls. She smiled up at him.

  “They teach you how to build them pyramids up to Hostess? Wish my bag boy coulda seen.” He lifted his sergeant shaped paper hat and scratched stringy hair under it. Ishtar waited patiently for the woman. A bag boy came in stiff in his linen apron. Ishtar was excited. The bag boy blew her a silent kiss and took his station at the checkout counter. She nodded at him and mouthed, “I’ll meet you in the Produce Room.”

  At last, at midmorning, the magic eye doors swung open and the woman entered. The bag boy followed the woman’s behind hungrily, blowing it a kiss as it disappeared into a wall of Wonder Bread and Miracle Mix loaves. Ishtar forgave him his disloyalty. The doors swung open again and a husky manchild, his legs like columns, wearing camp shorts with many pockets, zippers, whistles and knife chains, burst in. He stopped at the Cupcake buildings, admiring them. Ishtar smiled nervously as he examined her. Then he shouted in a gravel voice: “Mother?”

  “Right.” His mother’s voice came back, vibrating powerfully along the aisles.

  Ishtar’s neck pulsed with excitement. The manchild walked toward the loaves of bread and his mother’s voice. Ishtar, the Terrible Mother, among other things, smiled politely and considered the new woman. Her hair was too straight. Her clothes were a workman’s. But the slight hook of her nose, the pinkness of her cheek meat, the Tartar slants of the bones, the statuesque frame and the bare feet were satisfactory. Ishtar ran her trembling hands over the pyramid and dome. It had to be correct this time, enough of Snow Whites and False Queens. She would forego the lettuce leaves and the bag boy. There was no time for play.

  When the mother and the manchild stood in the checkout line, Ishtar smiled at the manchild and waved a Twinkie at him invitingly. He pulled the mother’s sleeve. She shook him off and bent to unload her food cart. The bag boy watched, looking down into her shirt and the full white flesh between the lapels. She lifted a heavy case of cat food, grunting at the effort, caught his probing eyes and straightened up with hands on her hips. “My turn. Unzip your pants and I’ll watch you load.” She grinned and stared at a growing bulge in his jeans while his face reddened and swelled under the white leprous splotches of acne cream, like a mushroom. He unloaded the cart. Ishtar clapped delightedly and waved a Twinkie at the manchild again. The manchild approached her. She knelt and caressed the warm tan skin of his shoulders. He reached for the Twinkie and slipped it carefully into a back pocket, zipping it closed.

  “Where are your two front teeth, little love?” Ishtar asked of him, running her hands along his arms. She wished to bite the fat of his forearm. He looked over his shoulder at his mother and whispered to Ishtar:

  “I pulled them out. Both of them.”

  “Aaaah.” Ishtar filled the remaining pockets herself, smoothing the gabardine over his small body, zipping as she went. “Nice. Correct.”

  The mother pushed her basket by them. “Let’s go, Beast.”

  Ishtar and the bag boy watched the dungareed hips roll vulgarly.

  Many features of initiation rites suggest that they are in part sacrificial offerings to a female goddess. It is all written in your books. Spence and Gillens, Barton have reported numerous instances in which the initiates present their foreskins, blood or teeth to women. Among certain natives of Victoria, Australia, on arriving at manhood, a youth is conducted by three leaders of the tribe into the recesses of the woods; being furnished with a suitable piece of wood, he knocks out two of the front teeth of his upper jaw, and on returning to the camp, gives them to his mother. Loeb (and others) is convinced that circumcision was a sacrifice to a female goddess. He follows Barton, who holds that originally all Semitic circumcision was a sacrifice to a goddess of fertility. This placed the child under her protection and consecrated its reproductive powers to her service. Bring home something nice for mother.

  After Ishtar purchased a restaurant size can of halved pears, she followed the mother and the manchild out to a rosewood Plymouth station wagon, calling to them. “Here, take the rest. Take them, I’m finished here.”

  The mother’s periwinkle eyes were bored and haughty. “Thank you, no. He exists on Hostess Cupcakes and Hi-C. We don’t need anymore.” She turned her back regally.

  Pleased with the combination of the vulgar and the regal, Ishtar also turned her back, ignoring the refusal. She opened the car door and dismantled the pyramid of Cupcakes onto the seat. Three orange tiger cats stretched and yawned with snakelike jaws on the black leather seat. The mother, watching her, took a Twinkie from Ishtar’s shopping bag, leaned against the car, squeezed the creme forward and licked provocatively off the top. Her boy moved behind her, whispering loudly in the gravel voice. “She’s gonna give them all to us. Is she kookoo?”

  The cats eyed Ishtar; their heads simultaneously followed her hands. When the Cupcakes were all in the car, Ishtar held up her palms and the cats licked them with warm sandpaper tongues. Then she dumped her shopping bag of Twinkies on the floor of the back seat and slammed the door. She turned and faced the mother. She fixed her with her best basilisk stare, lifted her skirts and ruffled apron and displayed, with a pelvic jerk, her feathered crotch. The mother shoved the manchild behind her. She laughed loudly, though, crumbs spewing onto her fair chest, flashed a hand forward and plucked a feather. Ishtar yelped. Her eyes burned with rage and amusement. She dropped her skirts.

  “I am Ishtar,” she spoke in a threatening monotone within the mother’s dwindling laughter. “I am Ishtar. You will eat one Cupcake a day for seven days at the rising of the Evening Star. Nothing more. They are marked for you. On the fourth day you will cleanse thyself. On the seventh day you will have wisdom. On the eighth day you shall grow feathers. On the eighth day you shall be Ishtar also. You have been chosen.”

  The mother wiped tears of laughter from her eyes. Ishtar muttering, caressed the manchild’s behind swiftly and secretly, sent her cart sailing across the parking lot and sauntered away, tossing her apron and bonnet into a pile of charcoal briquets, which instantly burst into bright blue flames. At her back she heard the Mother’s car leave, tires skidding from the conc
rete plaza. “Drive carefully.” She waved a pythic finger after her.

  “You gonna get feathers, Mom?”

  “Don’t be silly. If anything, I’d prefer a silky tail.”

  The manchild leaned over the seat and counted Cupcakes. The mother patted his pockets. A cat climbed into her lap as she drove, scratched a nest between her legs and slept, purring heavily. The mother grinned and slipped the feather inside her bra for safekeeping. That night she wrote a line from Anaïs Nin under the slant-eyed Chinaman’s heads in the phone directory. “She was spreading herself like the night over the universe and found no god to lie with.”

  It didn’t seem to be her thought, but she welcomed it as it articulated something long hidden within her. She put the child to sleep and masturbated gently with Ishtar’s feather, wishing her husband the same accuracy, and dreamt of pine trees and puffball mushrooms with tiny streams of ancient mushroom powders bursting under her fingers from the dusky centers. She didn’t know, on awaking, where she had learned about puffballs.

  The elder Ishtar, after leaving the supermarket, rented a small room in the sleet gray YWCA near a library. The ladies’ room at the library was amazingly decorated with Sumerian terms. She passed the seven days, remaining in her room and visiting the library, translating the Gideon back to Sumerian, working through pages and pages of garbled instructions, recipes and mushroom prayers. Someday she dreamed to correct the man-made Bible that had been so monstrously rewritten after she had been slain. Ishtar was tired of destruction, tired of being called a virgin, and tired most of all of the ever recurring claims by upstart males that they created the universe, the world and man. Remembering viciously, she pulverized pears at dusk every night, added the roots of a large female mandrake and mixed the potion in Genesee beer, a local product. She ate the mixture each night as she had instructed the mother to eat, and waited, greatly impatient for the woman to realize her chosenness. And each night, crosslegged, Ishtar held her breasts and directed her energies into the suburban mother. And each night Ishtar entered wisdom into the dreams of the mother. Then she herself would lay her hands under her head, her tiny feet tucked beneath her on the stiff mattress of the iron bed, and listen. At last, on the seventh night, she rose, opened the window and blew puffs of frosted air into the black as the new Ishtar received her final wisdom in the shade of the night.