Skinny Legs and All

by Tom Robbins

  “Do you really think they were sad about it? Maybe they were. At any rate, they got back together eventually. Reunited in Herod’s Temple. Just like a Hollywood movie.”

  “Sigh.”

  Herod was a Semite, half-Hebrew, in fact, and king of Judea, but he had “Property of the Roman Empire” stamped on his backside, and nobody would let him forget it. He stood on his head and spit shekels in an attempt to win favor with the Jews, but liking Herod was harder than trying to explain quantum radiation on a Mexican postcard. The pillaging, the rape, the torture, humiliation, and butchery visited upon Jerusalem’s Jews over the centuries by various foreign contingents were simply too great and too horrendous to ever, ever be forgotten. Herod could part his hair like a Jew, shine his shoes like a Jew, trim his wick like a Jew, and spit in the whiskers of every pig he passed, but having received half of his chromosomes from Edom, and his throne (and license to tax) from Rome, he was considered an opportunistic foreigner who could not, would not be trusted.

  During the thirty-three years of his reign, Herod did everything but wiggle his ears to wow Jerusalem, including restoring its architecture and religion (the buildings that originally had replaced those demolished by the Babylonians were functional, at best, and the practice of Judaism had been brutally restricted toward the end of the Greek occupation). Although Herod’s friendly overtures were appreciated, even applauded, he remained personally unpopular until that time when, in a final magnanimous gesture, he set about to renovate and glorify the Second Temple.

  Unattractive to begin with, the Second Temple had been reduced to practically a burnt-out shell by Hellenistic antagonists. Nevertheless, it had stood for four centuries, and the rituals performed therein had so impressed a visiting Alexander the Great that he consented to leave it standing. Everyone was excited, if suspicious, when Herod whipped out the hammer and the paintbrush. But Herod did it up right.

  To assuage the fears of his subjects that he would pull down the existing temple and then be unable or unwilling to complete his grand design, Herod spent eight years gathering materials and selecting and training a work force. The inner buildings were built by a crew of one thousand Hebrew priests, laying every stone according to some arcane religious law.

  The overall structure, with its retaining walls, cloisters, massive pillars, and courtyards within courtyards, covering thirty-six acres, was virtually a carbon copy of the First Temple, which is to say, ironically, it was an ancient and thoroughly pagan Phoenician or Canaanite design. (As Can o’ Beans had learned that day in the fossil bed, Phoenicians and Canaanites were really the same people, their chief difference being that the branch of the race called Phoenicians were coastal dwellers and seafarers, while Canaanites lived inland in the deserts and hills. Incidentally, Canaan meant “land of the purple” in a Near Eastern dialect, precisely what Phoenicia meant in Greek, so both branches were indelibly colored by the royal dye of the conch.)

  Herod’s embellishments turned out to be every bit as lavish as Solomon’s. The Temple and its enclosures were covered with plates of silver and gold, so much gold that Josephus claimed that men literally went blind from temple-gazing on sunny summer days. From a distance, it shone like the sun itself.

  Perhaps unconsciously, certain pagan compounds were stirred into the mixture. Josephus mentioned that the Temple roofs were “adorned with cedar, curiously graven,” and surrounding the inner buildings were rich spoils that Herod’s armies had pillaged from Arab countries. The lintel above the entrance to the Temple proper was “adorned with embroidered veils, with flowers of purple.” Purple, mind you. And from the crownwork hung carved vines of purple grapes, clusters “as tall as a man.” At the back of the foyer, giant gold-plated doors were concealed by what was described as “a Babylonian curtain . . . of fine linen . . . in scarlet and purple,” and “embroidered upon it all that was mystical in the heavens excepting that of the twelve signs.” While the priests may have sought to avoid depicting the animalistic aspects of astrology, they didn’t hesitate to include celestial symbols: the first enclosed section of the Temple contained a candlestick with seven branches for the seven planets that were known, and a table upon which rested “shew-bread—twelve loaves representing the circle of the zodiac.” And wittingly or not, they paid tribute to the most intimate feature of the Goddess, when to the ceremonial garments of the high priests they attached sweet little vaginal pomegranates of solid gold.

  So overshadowed were these vestiges of nearly forgotten paganism by the trappings and rituals of Yahwehistic Judaism that even purists glossed them over. Yahweh would be honored in those halls more exclusively and magnificently than he had ever been honored before.

  Alas, just when Herod had the Jews in his debt, had them trusting enough to buy a used chariot from him, he blew it. As the Temple was about to be dedicated, following eleven years of planning and perspiration, he had to go and stick a huge Roman eagle over its main entrance. That act infuriated the Hebrews, not only by its arrogant, insensitive tribute to hated foreign overlords, but by its signal—to those aware enough to interpret it—that paganism once again would be allowed to infiltrate and pollute Yahweh’s central authority. Indeed, not many years passed before first Conch Shell and then Painted Stick were quietly reinstated in the Temple household.

  THE AUTUMN MOON is the color of nectarines and iron.

  It is swollen and dizzy, like a hashish dumpling.

  After it sets, all the gold in the Temple sighs with relief.

  But its colors linger on in the grapes that pout on the vine.

  The priest awakes before dawn. He puts his pomegranates on.

  And he walks on down the hill.

  He comes to a pure little spring, below the Temple walls.

  He dips a conch shell in the gurgling waters.

  And he walks back up the slope.

  Pomegranates jingling like sheep bells, the priest carries the shellful of water to the sacred enclosure.

  The area is illuminated by thousands of candles.

  Each candle is meant to be a star.

  Slowly, slowly now, the priest pours the water onto the ground.

  A conch tongue of clear water licks the old stone pulse.

  While a candle galaxy bristles with secrets of the night.

  Over and over, the priest makes the journey. Sky to water. Water to earth. Earth to sky.

  Until the sun rises and gives the gold something new to fret about.

  THUS, FOR THE LAST PART of its five-hundred-year life, the Second Temple integrated the old religion into the new. Married spirit to soul. Provided a functional metaphor for transcendence. Drew human individuals into the cosmic cycles in a real and personal way.

  Conch Shell served as a chalice to cup the juices of existence. Painted Stick was a rod for psychic lightning, a post to which the Milky Way was moored.

  Passing under the hated Roman eagle, ignoring its military talons the way the other pilgrims did, young Jesus would have witnessed those ceremonies. In contrast to the hypocrisy, doctrinairism, and corruption that was becoming rampant among the Temple hierarchy (and that would soon incite him to open revolt), Jesus must have found the rituals nourishing. On the other hand, they may have made him uncomfortable. Certainly, those who were to establish a religion in his name were uncomfortable with them. For those who would pray but not dance, fast but not feast, baptize but not splash, flog but not fuck, for those who would buy spirit but sell soul, crown Father but deceive Mother, those men found Herod’s Temple a threatening place at vernal equinox and under a harvest moon.

  As Can o’ Beans recounted the rites, all that he/she had learned about them from the reticent stick and shell, Spoon felt a teensy bit uncomfortable, herself. There was a beauty and grace in them that appealed to her refined sensibility, but they made her queasy, nonetheless. The part that really made her squirm, however, was the part about Salome. How the teenage Salome had driven her stepfather, poor beleaguered King Herod, over the brink of sanit
y the night she danced the Dance of the Seven Veils, skinny legs and all.

  “That must have been some dance,” said Can o’ Beans. “Herod never got over it.”

  “Oh, but ma’am/sir, it wasn’t just that lewd hootchey-kootch that sickened Herod. He was already suffering from melancholy and rejection. Why, to entice Salome to dance, he had to promise to behead John the Baptist. Served up the head on a silver platter. Ooo, isn’t that just too gross! A human head on a dish like a pot roast. I can’t bear to think about it.”

  “It was Herod’s wife, supposedly, Salome’s mother, who wanted John the Baptist killed.”

  “No matter. Herod agreed to it. Just to get a good look at that young girl. Kiddie porn, they call it nowadays. . . .”

  “She was sixteen. In that era, a sixteen-year-old was in every respect a woman.”

  “Not the point, begging your pardon. The point is that it was Herod’s own accumulated wickedness that drove him crazy, not some shameful feminine display.”

  “Perhaps you’re right, Miss Spoon. Who knows what causes the human brain to split its britches. It would seem that the brain hangs so many curtains between itself and the true universe that eventually light can no longer reach it, and it molds and rots and festers in the dark. In any event, the king of Judea had a lot of spit in his harmonica. By the time Salome’s dance was done, he was playing a feeble tune, indeed. Defiant Jews cut down the Roman eagle from the Temple while he was still alive, slobbering and raving on his couch.”

  “Good for them. Finally, he was too drunk and depraved to stop them from cleansing God’s house.”

  “Well, the eagle was gone, but the Temple didn’t change all that much. Miss Conch still poured at festival times, and Mr. Stick was always on hand if some priest should take a notion to stir the stew of sex and stars. He’d become their compass needle, in a sense, pointing to the north from where their Messiah was prophesied to come. And there was plenty of commercialism, plenty of corruption left in the Temple, as well. Remember how Jesus was said to have grabbed an ox whip and driven the money changers out?”

  “Herod had passed away by then.”

  “Yes, he died while Jesus was a child. Miss Shell and Mr. Stick, by the way, have no recollection of this Jesus fellow at all. According to them, he had precious little impact on Jerusalem until four decades after he was crucified. But I know you don’t want to talk about that. The thing to bear in mind is that the situation got generally worse for the Jews after Herod expired. Rome clamped down. The Jews resisted. Clamp. Resist. Clamp. Resist. Until finally the Romans got fed up with the constant hassle and, in 70 A.D., razed Jerusalem yet again. Again! Can you imagine? Just obliterated it. Killed a million people. General named Titus plundered the Temple, stripped it bare, and sailed for Italy with all of its treasures. The spoils were put on public view in a place called the Temple of Peace. From the City of Peace—Jerusalem—to the Temple of Peace in imperial Rome. Humans tend to use the word peace rather loosely, don’t you agree? That disregard for the true meaning of words may be one of the main reasons their brains go bad. Did I ever elucidate my theory—”

  “Indeed, you did, ma’am/sir,” Spoon hastened to inform the can. “Quite adequately. Sticking to the subject, if you don’t mind: Conch Shell and Painted Stick, they weren’t abducted to Rome.”

  “They were the type of booty that a military mind such as Titus would be inclined to overlook.”

  “Somebody thought enough of them to save them.”

  “Fortunately. Some Phoenician slave. Stole them out of the Temple ruins and hightailed into the wilderness. Miss Shell contends that there’re always a few enlightened human beings around who have need for her. Even today. Maybe more today than there’s been in a long, long while. That’s why she and Mr. Stick are active again. I don’t know, Miss Spoon, it smacks of wishful thinking to me. Magic and enlightenment at the end of the twentieth century? This wild idea of a Third Temple?”

  “Oh, goody, the Third Temple,” chirped Spoon, relieved that the history lesson was over. She adored to hear Can o’ Beans expound, but the version of biblical events that the tin had garnered from the stick and shell was most unsettling. “You did set out, you know, to tell me what you imagine the Third Temple will be like.”

  “If there ever is a Third Temple,” said Can o’ Beans.

  Out on Fifth Avenue, in the pitch of urbanity and the roar of ritz, the Reverend Buddy Winkler and two kosher-looking gentlemen had stopped at a hot dog cart. As the others watched, the preacher sank his new gold fangs into a frank. “I shouldn’t oughtta be eatin’ this,” he announced, wiping meat juice from his lips with a tissue napkin the size of a playing card. “Had a pound of pig barbecue for supper last night. It was so greasy my arteries took on a life of their own. Woke up this morning and they was already up, reading the newspaper. ’Fuck you,’ they said to me. ’We don’t need you.’ Then they turned to the financial page and commenced checkin’ out the latest listing on pork bellies.”

  The two rabbis regarded him with disbelief. Dirty Sock regarded him, too. The sock thought Buddy looked familiar. Before it could satisfactorily link the face to Colonial Pines or Boomer Petway, however, the preacher and his associates shot off down the chilly avenue, random projectiles in that long vomit of cashmere and fur that the electric muscles of the metropolis—"Stop! Go! Wait! Walk!"—expelled or contracted, in rhythm with their engineered pathology.

  Turning his attention to Turn Around Norman, who, like a frozen planet, had just begun his slow diurnal revolution around a tar sun on the sidewalk, Dirty Sock called, “Hey! The ol’ boy’s at it! Showtime!”

  His comrades failed to respond. Can o’ Beans was still garrulously speculating about a Third Temple in Jerusalem, and Spoon was too intrigued, or too timid, to cut him/her off.

  “Well, now, it’s correct that the First and Second Temples were physical twins almost, or duplicates, to speak more precisely, and therefore more sanely, but I can’t for the starch of me imagine Jews today, as much as they might cherish tradition, building anything closely resembling the first two. Not with all the advances in modern architecture. Not with wiring and sewer codes. Obviously, they’re not going to plate a large complex with silver and gold, not at what precious metals are going for. And think of the kidding they’d get if they erected phallic pillars or covered the doorways with carved fruit. It’s a different world we live in, wholly different, different right down to its molecules; even for fundamentalists, it’s different.

  “In the Second Temple, for example, females were prohibited from entering the inner court. They were restricted to an enclosure within the secondary courtyard, and when they were, excuse the expression, menstruating, they weren’t allowed in at all. Can you picture contemporary women sitting still for that? Ho-ho! Of course, there persists to be ultra-orthodox cults and sects in which the wives shave their heads and dress in gunnysacks in order, I suppose, not to pose any threats to their sexually insecure husbands. The fly in that ointment, as I view it, is that once potential fornicators get used to seeing women that way, pretty soon it won’t repulse them anymore. There’ll be men who get aroused by bald women. I mean, there could be magazines with shaved-head, gunnysack centerfolds.”

  “Please, ma’am/sir, you’re digressing.”

  “Oh. Right. I am,” conceded Can o’ Beans. “Sorry.” But before he/she could get back on track, Painted Stick and Conch Shell approached them.

  “Good morning,” said the container. “Greetings. Are you going to catch a bit of Turn Around Norman? Mr. Sock reports he’s spinning like a top.”

  The ancient relics hadn’t come over to enjoy the inimitable Norman, however, nor had they arrived to add to or subtract from the bean can’s rehashings and conjectures. Rather, they had come to announce that a decision had been reached, a decision so unexpected that it tore Dirty Sock away from the grate—and sent the dumbfounded little Spoon into a convulsive clatter.

  It wasn’t complicated. The talismans
had decided that one of their group must leave the cathedral, leave the hiding place and venture into the city. Specifically, one of them must link up with Turn Around Norman, must follow him home, observe him and his life-style at close range; offstage, as it were; and report back, if possible, the following day. Obviously, it was a dangerous ploy, but it was the only way the objects might accurately ascertain whether or not the street performer was capable of playing an active role in getting them out of New York and across the sea to Jerusalem.

  To minimalize the risk of discovery, the object selected for the mission would of necessity be the smallest among them, the least conspicuous. And that would be, of course, poor Spoon.

  A WEEK BEFORE THANKSGIVING, Ellen Cherry had a waitress dream. She had the waitress dream. She had the Nightmare of the Mixed-Up Orders. In that notorious dream, the waitress (in this case, Ellen Cherry) delivers the blood sausages to a table of Buddhists and serves the vampire party the garlic soup.

  She awoke with beads of sweat the size of popcorn above her upper lip and doming her nipples. And she didn’t feel a whole lot better after turning on the lamp because she knew that this dream was standing with one leg in reality.

  In the week since her conversation, her confrontation, with Boomer, she had been twisting in a cyclone of introspection. She’d gone from hurt to hope and back again; she’d endured pang, then numbness, and, finally, self-examination. She’d gone through her soul like a street thief going through a drunk’s pockets. And what she had found, along with enough emotional loose change to feed every vending machine in the Institute of Pop Psychology, was a snapshot of herself taken before she had declared herself an artist. The picture was so old and faded and crinkled that she couldn’t tell what she looked like in it.

  Maybe Boomer’s right, she thought. Right not only about me not really loving him—God knows I’ve never been willing to bet the farm on the steadfastness of my devotion—but right also about me being so lost in my identity as an artist that I couldn’t find my heart with a map and a flashlight. Certainly, he’s right about me being married to art, I’ve never denied that, but what I’ve got to consider, for the first time in my life, is whether maybe it isn’t a bad marriage. Whether I didn’t marry art when I was so young that I missed out on a lot of other things, things that might have taken me places and shown me stuff and made me whole and happy in ways I can’t even guess. If I had waited, maybe I would’ve ended up just dating art instead of marrying it, or maybe I would have had no truck with art at all.