Call Me Ishtar

by Rhoda Lerman

  “Cunt,” she began, “is from the Sumerian cunnus and means burden. Fuck,” she continued, “is from the Sumerian furca and means cross, indicating a point of meeting. All cookies,” she went on patiently into the night, “are cognate, as are bread, bagels, and language.” The lessons continued until sunrise. They included the terribly important recipes for balancing sexuality, for preparing mandragora juice for ecstasy and general comments on the state of the world, which was, of course, degenerate.

  On the eighth day, the mother discovered not feathers but fleas. On the eighth day, the boy unclenched both fists as the mother spooned honey and penicillin into his mouth. Two tiny boxes, engraved in gold by the dentist for the tooth fairy, black and clear plastic tephillin, lay in the palms of his fat hands. Inside them, through the clear covers of the coffins, the mother saw the two front teeth, long, grotesque, ivory. The boy swilled his mouth with water from a paper cup and spat noisly into the sink. “You keep them, okay, Mom?”

  She nodded at him and took them in her hands without looking. The teeth, even at a distance, shot a needle of pain into her stomach. “Didn’t it hurt you, baby? Didn’t it really hurt?”

  He touched her arm gently. “Do I get money for the ones I pull out?”

  The mother pulled him within her arms. “Baby, don’t do it anymore. Please. Listen, a secret. I’m the Tooth Fairy and there’s no cash for do-it-yourselfers.”

  He nuzzled against her breasts with his head. His hair smelled of his father’s styling lotion, almondy. “Can I name them?”

  She clicked the rattling boxes at his delicate ears like castanets.

  “Can’t I name them like babies?” He nuzzled in deeper, hurting her nipple.

  She pushed him away. “Listen, kid, I have the babies around here. You want to pull out your teeth, that’s your business. But I have the babies, get it? Go. Ride your bike or something. Like a boy. Go!”

  His face loosened, ugly, and his voice shrilled, much like Robert when his power was approached. “When did you get to be the Tooth Fairy?”

  “You gave me the teeth, didn’t you? That makes me the Tooth Fairy.”

  “But … oh, okay. Okay.” He swiped and knocked over a half-filled coffee cup. It broke in the kitchen sink.

  The mother raised her right arm and pointed her finger at the ceiling. It was a signal her son understood.

  “Okay. Okay. I said okay!”

  And it shall be as a sign that the Lord’s law shall be in thy mouth. That the tephillin must be square was revealed to Moses upon Sinai and also that they must be wrapped around with the hair of a beast and sewn with its sinews. He who purifies himself and washes his hands and puts on the tephillin and reads the Sch’ma and prays, he is accounted by the Scripture as one who has erected an altar and offered up a sacrifice thereon, for it is said, I will wash my hands in innocence, so will I compass your altar.

  “Come back here and wash your hands!”

  The boy obeyed. The mother attached the plastic tephillin to a chain and wore it on her graceful neck. As the boy stomped angrily past her, the mother spoke: “Hey, Beast. Come back here. I’ve got something for you too.”

  She held out a yellowed circle pin to him. On it was an apple shaped shield of blue with white stars. Inside the stars was an old slick-haired mustached man.

  “Who’s that?”

  “That’s Teddy Roosevelt. He was something of a great hunter, something also of a pig, but he had some good words. Here.” She knelt and pinned the button on his shirt. “Walk softly. Carry a big stick.”

  “Gee, thanks, Mommy. Thanks a lot. That’s cool.”

  “Fair enough,” Ishtar the Terrible Mother said to Ishtar the New Mother. “Fair enough.” The New Mother smiled over her son’s head in acknowledgment. “It won’t be easy,” the Terrible Mother said to her. “Initially, you must take care of those fleas.”

  “When do I get the feathers?”

  “Make room for the feathers.”

  “Who are you talking to, Mom?”

  “Get out and ride your bike, please.” She stood tall and regal and pointed her warning finger to the sky. The son raced out of the kitchen.

  “What fleas?” the new Ishtar asked again. But the old woman was gone.

  The old Ishtar descended in the wrought-iron cage elevator to the lobby of the YWCA and made plane reservations for Mount Ararat, from whence a vessel would depart. The desk clerk, overhearing, couldn’t remember having heard the name of the airline before, but then she hadn’t traveled much. Ishtar was joyful. The new Ishtar, however, had fleas and was horribly discomfited.

  5

  IT IS TEETH, AS YOU HAVE SURMISED, WITH WHICH I HAVE PROBLEMS. Not my teeth, particularly, except for incidental fillings and cleanings, but with teeth. My father, I may have told you, died from … no, I am always careful to say died after he had had a tooth pulled. I am due this very moment at the dentist’s. I will not, however, honor my appointment. Then Robert will receive a bill for a disappointment, which is exceedingly clever but this is the level of humor one learns to expect from my dentist, who, as the chairman of the Temple B’nai Israel Cemetery Committee, collects funds to repair desecrated graves. I am charged for not coming just as I am charged more for sugarless gum because it has no sugar. I will tell Robert as he sits at the desk reading the insertions on the cumulative bill with the five dollar charges for disappointments that if I must pay the dentist for not coming, then he must pay me when I come, or at least when he comes.

  Robert is not at all amused. I can repeat verbatim what he has answered and will answer: “Look, Ishtar, you have three alternatives.” The fingers go up. “One, you keep your appointments with him, which you obviously can not do. Two, you find another dentist you prefer or, three …” I can not emulate the deep gloom ridden voice here, “Three, you don’t care for your teeth and you’ll have all kinds of problems and that will cost me a fortune.” The fingers are down into a knotted fist now. My father’s teeth are, I am sure, still strong and solid and gleaming goldcapped in the terrible purple velvet lined open-mouthed coffin I had to look into before half the town and all the family when I was a child. Finding another dentist has absolutely no bearing on the matter.

  This week, however, I have an acceptable excuse. I have fleas. And it is excruciating, I will tell Robert, to sit still in the dentist’s chair while I am being attacked by my fleas. I do not know which of my four animals has given me fleas. Perhaps all of them are responsible since crossbreeding brings strength and durability. I have employed every manner of salve, ointment, balm, hunting procedure, soaking, Pristeen and Scope to no avail. Even Ammens Powder. I have had all the cats and the dog washed thoroughly at the veterinary hospital. I have treated my bedclothes with Pine Sol and Lysol. Fleas, I find from discreet questionings, lie in soft warm places as mohair upholstery, wool carpets and pubic centers and they leap, straight up and down, to bite skin on the move. They are vicious and rarely miss and their bites swell and rage with itching and I scratch and dig until I bleed from cavities in my legs and thighs. It is as if there is some devilish hand sowing them. I lie in bed stiff and still until I feel the stinging bite, fling back the covers with a scream for power but find nothing. The flea is gone. Perhaps, I have imagined hopefully, the fleas are white like the mircrocosmic pills on my Wamsutta Permaprest, but no, even on the dark floral patterns, no matter how quick I am, I find nothing. Perhaps the fleas change color like chameleons. They are not to be trusted. I do not understand what that woman has done to me. It is a desperate situation and Robert, from whom I have not been at all able to hide this information, is continually and unsympathetically awakened when I shout and disturb the entire kingdom of our peaceable bed. He will not touch me in love or desire.

  Although Robert knows nothing about teeth or fleas, he does, however, know music.

  He knows music very well. And when my hairdresser, who wears no underwear under knit pants and blows hot whiffs of himself into my ear and down my neck and slips
hairclips into my lap so he can snatch them out and is not to be trusted, said that his rock and roll band needed an investor and a manager, I decided a band would be good for Robert. He whistles a great deal, tonelessly when he is sullen, plays strong major chords on the piano and I have seen him, with his enormously long daddy legs, jump into the air and kick one ankle. “He can make a lot a bread off us,” Nino blew into my ear at the beauty parlor. And I thought as a leavening agent in the desert of Robert’s work ethic, a band would be fun. It isn’t that Robert wants the money. He doesn’t care about money as long as he has enough and his demands, really, are minimal. So Robert became an investor this week and the manager this week and now will make decisions about recording, playing weekends, salaries and insurance on equipment. And I will take care of the day to day heartaches, rather like a mother, which include girls, wives, penicillin shots, clothes, egos, mothers, lunch, poster designs, radio tapes and whatever it takes to keep seven bad ass men contented. They are not boys in age. They are men. And it will give me something to do. My son, after all, is in school a full day.

  Under the stage in a dimly lit room with a dripping sink and a cracked mirror, the Demons prepared themselves.

  “The man’s out there with his old lady. Lay it on,” their leader told them as he sprayed his hair with Adorn.

  “Dig.”

  “You see the pockets on his suit? Filled with bread.”

  “Class chick,” another remarked.

  “She foreign or something?”

  “Around here,” the leader answered, “class is foreign.”

  “I wanna eat her knees.”

  “You’re real class yourself, Nino.” The leader spilled cologne on his wrists.

  “Big leader don’t lower himself to eat,” someone else added, grabbing the cologne for himself.

  In Hagar Qim on Malta in the forbidden third temple a hidden chamber is behind the altar. A tube bored at knee level in the rock slab wall emerges at ground level in the penetralia. The priests speak through the tube, howling, moaning. They terrify the earthly visitants with sounds from the beyond and echoes from the dead. The Great Mother who is the source of all things, who maketh the wadis run with manna and honey, enters her temple.

  With thee, thy seven lads, Plump Damsel, Daughter of the Mist, with thee, Dewy, Daughter of the Showers. Thy face thou shalt surely set toward the Mountain of Concealment. Take the mountain on thy hands, the hill on the top of thy palms and descend to the House of Corruption in the underworld and thou shalt be numbered with those that go down into the earth. Go down. Yea, thou shalt know annihilation as the dead.

  She comes. The Goddess from the great above she set her mind toward the great below. My lady abandoned heaven, abandoned earth, to the nether world she descended, leaving the phone number with her babysitter, reincarnated, reblooded, in skins of mink and boots of cowhide and kohl on her eyes, seeking her immortal lover in the great below. Tammuz, long have I wept. Behind Ishtar walks Moses with a vest and cash in his pocket and a set of laws scraped with bleeding fingernails into the rock of ages. Ishtar is happy to have toes again.

  “Why the hell should I invest in these guys?”

  Ishtar taps her fingers on the scarred tabletop to the jukebox music while Robert finds his own answer. Once she herself had a band. Once she herself had dark demons who whistled down the highways in terror, scourging heaven and earth of unbelievers. They had not been ordinary. These boys in the band, as Robert explained, were ordinary.

  “I don’t need the money.”

  Ishtar smiled benignly at Robert.

  “Ishtar, I can make something of these boys, create something.”

  Robert will never be happy until he is able to have a baby. Until then, for a sense of power, he will sell anything. One of my sons, giddy Jack, sold me, his own mother, for a handful of beans. The beans, as the legend goes, contained spirits and Jack thought he could bring them to life. He could do nothing with them and, in defeat, planted them. He had hoped to make babies without me. Nice boy. He sold me, in my image as cow, down the road. Robert is rankled by my power of birth, also. Although he thanks God every day that he was not created a woman, he has been a Mason, a boy scout and a fraternity man. He has been initiated in all their secret ways with the doors closed and the lights out. The rituals are all the same. They are trying to imitate birth. They can not. Have you ever seen a bar mitzvah? It is the quintessence of male stupidity. The rabbi and the father and the cantor dress as women and pray to a male god to bring the boy to manhood. A boy can come to manhood only through a woman. Out of sheer frustration, they sell things.

  “Do you realize what kind of money one hit record could make? With personal appearances as a follow-up?”

  Ishtar nodded. The appearance at Fatima unintentionally had brought the pope a fortune.

  “That’s the leader over there. Jesus, I never noticed it before. He looks queer. How can I sell a guy like that as a sex image?”

  Ishtar looked in the direction of Robert’s nod. Ishtar fixed the boy in her sight and waited as his eyes slid over her languidly, dextrously, then blinked as he recognized something and disappeared under heavy fruited lashes. Pain had shown for only a sweet perfect moment. The pain had given her a sudden orgasmic rush, a joy in her belly. Ishtar wanted to see more of his pain. He was not ordinary.

  “He won’t be so pretty when I finish with him. If I can sell polyesters, I can sell a band. It’s all in the packaging. Follow the laws of good merchandising, you can sell anything. Even your mother.”

  Robert laughed. His laugh is false. If it is beautiful and you are Moses, you either fuck it or sell it. Robert fears his desire for the beautiful in other men. He fears that which is womanly in himself and fights with himself. He will make the boy over in his image. To sell. Since there is nothing else he will allow himself to do with the boy’s beauty.

  We both watch the boy. We are both insatiable in differing ways. He talks to a young girl who moves in flutters about him, touching him, touching the cloth of his cape. His cheekbones are slicing and hungry. His skin, outlined by long soft black hair, is taut and sallow. His eyes, large and soft, intelligent. From a strong pedestal of shoulder rises a thick and graceful neck. His teeth are even. His smile, gentle. The cape, black outside, blood red inside, exaggerates the hunger of his lips and jawbone. He is not ordinary.

  “Why change him, Robert?”

  “I think he’s queer. We’ll worry about that later. You’re going to have work to do if I take this band. Get you out of the kitchen. You’re always complaining about the kitchen.”

  Ishtar yawned to cover her interest in the boy. Can I this time love a man without ruining him? Year after year I have killed my lovers. It was with Tammuz’ death I was most wounded, for he was the first. There has always since been a vacuum in my soul. I have searched for years in the wilderness, on golf courses, among wadis, in forests of stone for a gentle juicy poet. But I have been reduced, betrayed, annihilated by my men and never truly loved. Faithfully I have slaved in their butteries, a thousand butteries, unending kitchens of adobe or stainless steel, and still I search. Now I am here in this underworld of rock and swamp creatures, half-formed, semi-conscious if at all, and I am afraid that this boy too is Baal, is Marduk, is … is any one of those who would love me, then fear me and then, in fear, annihilate me. In glorious agonizing pools of existence, everything repeats. I throw the stone, but often, too often, I am betrayed and swallowed. I am fed up with that number. I wiggle my toes. I am pleased with their feeling. I was tired of the claws and can now wear pantyhose.

  He tells secrets to the girl. I feel hot jealousy now.

  “It’s from a circus. In England.” He puts a corner of his cape into the girl’s young hand. She rubs it sensuously with promise against her cheek. “Gets me in hot water. I drive this red Caddy, see? You chew Sen-Sen? Nice. So I get stopped on the highway with the cape and the stage makeup. Three in the morning. My hair teased. The cop he does a double take and
starts ripping up the car. Upholstery, shakes out my talcum powder, all the time calling me fag.”

  He waits for the girl to laugh. It is important that she laugh. She laughs.

  He continues. “Rips up the dog I got in the back. With lights in its eyes? Everything. Finds nothing. Had it in my hair.” His hands run through his hair. They are infinitely old against the silkenness of his flowing hair. Lettuce picker’s hands roped with veins and new scratches.

  I would lick them. Ah, Tammuz, is it you again? The lover of my youth? Wash him with pure water, anoint him with sweet oil, clothe him with a red garment. Let him play on a flute of lapis lazuli. Let courtesans turn his mood. How long have I bowed low, sat and wept for you.

  And Marduk, who sucks the breasts of the Goddess, who slew the Goddess Tiamat and was worshiped in a pavilion made of her skin, sits on the pavilion. Somewhere. I can not see him. The room is hung with Schlitz signs rather than harvest fruits and palm fronds, but no difference. It is the same cult hut of the wilderness, the land of the immortal, where the heroes die only by violence, never age, by speeding tickets and bad hash. It is the cult hut where I bring them to one with the God Head, where they find their immortality within their mortality. “You want head, you want head?” the obscene little girls scream from the dance floor to the musicians on the altar. They are only phallus worshipers and have denigrated themselves to nothingness. But there is a chance. Where there is a Will there is a Way and I am here to show you the Way. The red, green and blue cloud pillars of spotlights and cigarette smoke descend over the ancient tabernacle. It is the holder of that which is sacred. That which Moses stole from Egypt: my Ark. It is the same as the Holy of Holies in your synagogues. It is all the same. We keep coming back in other clothes. The light operator sits on a support beam and works the neons and the musicians sit in the pine plank womb of the Great Mother, the place of initiation. It doesn’t matter where it happens. As long as it happens. It is night and it is the time of the Great Mother. And the musicians sit in the sukka awaiting the Messiah, but She comes instead. It is in my womb that thou shalt become a man. In no other way. Here, I say to Enki, sit thou in my vulva and I shall heal thee. Tonight be a man in your pavilion, the paved loin of the Mother Goddess and the temple virgins with their demisermihemmies vulvulating, offering themselves to the sons of the Muse in my name. Ah, I have dreamt in a den of snakes. I have been a divine woman sleeping beneath the sea. I grant my gift to those who love me. And now, here on Butternut Street at the Crossroads of America, etc., I re-emerge. But not yet. Not quite yet.