Skinny Legs and All

by Tom Robbins

  In the basement of St. Patrick’s, Conch Shell and Painted Stick rushed to the grate, followed by their three companions.

  “Oh, dear,” gasped Spoon. “It’s her.”

  “Who’d you expect?” asked Dirty Sock. “Mother goddamn Teresa?”

  Can o’ Beans was last to arrive. He/she had been contemplating his/her reflection in the mirror, wondering if Miss Charles had painted him/her from memory or if she’d used another bean can as a model. “This situation is potentially dangerous,” he/she observed.

  There was a Spoon-rattling crash of thunder, and the rain began to leave the sky like refugees fleeing a revolution, arriving with nothing but the clothes on their backs and whatever skills they might have acquired in their dark villages. “Jezebel!”

  The preacher advanced on her very, very slowly, as if he had borrowed a page from Turn Around Norman’s book, a book printed on zinc with an ink of cold molasses. But advance he did, jagged wires of lightning twisting like Frankenstein’s umbilical cord across his crazed eyes. He was less than ten paces from her when a mighty cloud clap boxed her ears, shaking her from her trance. She whirled and made as if to run, but her shoe heel, not designed for athletic action, gave way, and she fell to her knees. So drenched was she that she had trouble righting herself in the downpour.

  “Jezebel!” screamed the preacher above the thunder, and he bounded toward her like an ocelot toward its fallen prey, his mouth wide open, his phallus as hard as a shovel. As he neared her, at full speed, a shaft, a stave, a wooden pole of some sort suddenly shot through the bars of the street-level grate, blocking his right ankle and tripping him flat on his face. His boils skidded along the wet concrete, a tooth punctured his lower lip. He slid directly into Ellen Cherry, but she managed to stand up and yank off her ruined shoes before dashing to safety in the rain.

  The objects pulled back from the grate until the preacher, dazed, soaked, and bleeding, stumbled down Fifth Avenue in the direction of his office, stopping every few feet to turn and stare, puzzled, in their general direction. Then, Painted Stick looked at the others guiltily, as if to say, “May the stars above forgive me. I’ve done it again.”

  My heart is a Latin American food stall

  And your love is a health inspector from Zurich

  PEPE, WHO’D JUST COME on duty in the Ansonia lobby, was playing the recently released Raoul Ritz cassette on his boom box. He had intended to play it for Ellen Cherry, and he’d also intended to ask her at last about the spoon that had wasted Raoul back in April—was it really hers, how had it managed to land on Raoul? he kept forgetting to inquire—but when she walked through the door in her stocking feet, her dress sopping wet, her knees dirty, her stampede of curls looking as if it had finally gone over a cliff, Pepe’s mind went blank.

  “Miz Charl, holy shit, man! What happen to you, man?”

  “Hard day at the office, Pepe.” She smiled at him through chattering teeth and padded, dripping rainwater on the tiles, to the elevator.

  Upstairs, she drew a hot bath, climbed into it, and had a brief cry. She might have wept longer had she not known that Spike would be by in an hour or two to comfort her. Spike Cohen was good at comforting her. Spike Cohen was good, in general. No starry-eyed old fool, he hadn’t lost his head, begged her to marry him, been jealous of every younger man who crossed their path, or showered her with expensive gifts. About once a week, he presented her with a new pair of shoes, but, then, her shoes seemed to have short lifespans these days, and, besides, Spike got them wholesale. Maybe he wasn’t Tarzan in bed, but he wasn’t Cheetah, either. Any lack of athletic torque or acrobatic flex was compensated for by his tenderness, sensitivity, and attentiveness. And, of course, by the fact that at just the right moment in just the right tone of voice, he addressed her by a particular appellation of biblical origin, a name that for whatever reason had the power to spin her clitoris like the propeller on a toy motorboat.

  Thanks to the increasing popularity of Salome, Isaac & Ishmael’s was thriving, attracting many drinkers and some diners, even on those evenings when the girl wasn’t dancing. The place didn’t get real busy until eight-thirty or nine, so on this, Ellen Cherry’s night off, she expected Spike to drop by her apartment about six to spend a couple hours with her. Sure enough, at five-fifty, he tapped at her door with the wedges of a new pair of Maud Frizons. Upon admitting him, however, she saw at once that it might be she who had to supply the comfort and consolation.

  “Such a pain I got! Sex is out!”

  Spike’s emerald eyes were duller, sadder than usual, and he walked as if he was helping somebody move a refrigerator. He explained that all week he had suffered intermittent pain and cramping in his lower back, and now it had moved into his—He used the Yiddish word for testicles, but Ellen Cherry got the idea. She was contrite. “Maybe we’ve been doing it too often,” she suggested. “Or too hard.” Having never had an older lover before, she was unclear about their durability. She didn’t wish to push the envelope.

  “No, no,” Spike protested. “At tennis I probably already strained something. Oy!”

  Spike removed his shoes and reclined on the bed. Ellen Cherry put on her shoes, the Maud Frizons that Spike had just delivered, and lay down beside him. She was wearing her kimono, and panties that were the envy of the less fortunate ones in the dresser. They, the underpants in the drawer, were continually shushing one another as they vacillated between bursts of diet-cola twitter and straining to hear everything that transpired in the bedroom. For his part, Daruma the vibrator sensed that something was amiss and that his giggling zenbo were likely to be disappointed. “When radish is cooked, crunch fly up chimney,” he said.

  The couple shared sips from a flask of rum that Ellen Cherry had taken to keeping on the bedside table. “Anything I can do for you?” she asked.

  “No, no,” said Spike, gritting his teeth. Then he told her about a reporter from the Village Voice who had shown up at the I & I that afternoon asking a lot of questions about Salome. The reporter had seen Salome dance on Saturday night, and now he wanted to write an article about her. “I say, okay, write all you want, but only with her tambourine does she talk.”

  “That’s a fact, Spike. I haven’t heard a peep from her in two months. And she’s out of there fast as those skinny legs will carry her when her set is over.”

  “So I tell him, okay, write, write, but be sure you write that a Jew and an Arab together are making it possible.”

  “Good. I’m sure he will. The Voice is nothing if not political. Even its personals are political.”

  “Oy! Those lonely people what’re advertising their own charms, but their shoe size or foot condition never mentioning.”

  They conversed for a while about how lonely they each had been before they got together, yet how they’d have croaked of loneliness rather than advertise for companionship, and whether that attitude was a reflection of dignity or repression. It was cozy and sweet lying there talking, and Spike’s pain, like the thunderstorm, appeared to have subsided. At least, he was grimacing with less force. Ellen Cherry didn’t feel quite ready to broach the subject of the Reverend Buddy Winkler’s attack, so she talked about Ultima and the show at the gallery.

  “Ultima’s probably right, her artists are admitting defeat. The extraterrestrial in the woodpile is that they expect to be rewarded for those defeats every bit as much as if they were triumphs. You get it? They believe they have an ethical, social right to be exhibited and reviewed and collected regardless of their level of skill or verve, and despite the fact that their work is often a deliberate protest against the whole idea of exhibits, reviews, and collections. Anything less, any favoritism shown those with extraordinary abilities, would be unfair, undemocratic, elitist, reactionary, what have you. Jesus! I wasn’t aware that mediocrity was such a virtue. But it looks like both democracy and socialism exist to encourage it.”

  “Maybe you prefer a kink?”

  At first, she thought Spike was inviting her to
indulge one or the other of their sexual proclivities, and she was taken aback by his bluntness, but then she caught on. “A king? No, not a king. I don’t know what system I’d prefer. But I do know that people who really excel at things—whether it’s creating art or running a business—hardly ever make a big fuss about equality, except maybe on the scales of justice. Equal opportunity, yes. Equal results, impossible. The ones who’re so upset about everybody not being the same, about competition, about standards of quality, about art objects having ’auras’ around them, they’re usually people with average abilities and average minds. And below average senses of humor. Whether it’s a matter of lifting the deprived up or dragging the gifted down, they want everybody to function on their level. Some fun that would be.”

  “Not to blame, little darlink. It’s only the new American dream they share.”

  “Which?”

  “In Europe my family left their toes, but to Ellis Island they brought a dream. The old American dream. Work hard, save your money, be decent, and success you’re bound to have. A business of your own. A house. Nice food on the table, carpets, curtains. Maybe two weeks in December in Miami Beach. Only if you’re my family you swim with your slippers on. Okay. I grew up with that dream. But these artists you’re describing, the self-promoting crybabies what are intentionally being shlockmeisters and gonifs, they dream the new American dream. And the new one is to achieve wealth and recognition without having the burden of intelligence, talent, sacrifice, or the human values what are universal.”

  “Yeah, I reckon a lot of people are spoiled like that nowadays. In all fields. At all ages, too. But frankly, Spike, I don’t really care if artists work a forty-hour week or obey the Ten Commandments. I don’t even give a rat’s hair if they pay their dues, just so long as their paintings go the distance. But if they can’t provide me with something gorgeous or astonishing to look at, then don’t expect me to forgive them their trespasses.”

  “No, no, little darlink. Everybody must be forgiven.”

  “Including Buddy Winkler?” At this point, she told Spike about the attack, and sure enough, he was able to comfort her, to make her feel all right about it, to feel all right even about the retreat of Turn Around Norman. He held her and slowly commenced to knead the loaves of her buttocks and the cupcakes of her breasts. Soon, they forgot the physical and mental things that troubled them, respectively. The dolphin carried them to where the crests were wild and bumpy and the troughs salty and deep.

  Lost in her ecstasy, Ellen Cherry hadn’t realized how vigorously she had begun to buck. Mindlessly, she arched and thrust and thrashed until his moans—not of pleasure but of pain—escalated into a scream that froze the sea around her. Gasping, he rolled off her, off the bed and onto the floor, where in a small pool of vomit, he lay ashen and unconscious.

  “Oh, my God!” she cried. “I’ve killed him.”

  THE AIDS EPIDEMIC, according to the Reverend Buddy Winkler and his colleagues, was a plague visited upon the earth by Jehovah to punish the sexually adventurous. AIDS was proof positive, they preached, that humanity’s days were numbered. The fact that the AIDS toll was a mere drop in the bucket compared to the mortality figures of the fourteenth century, when the bubonic pandemic wiped out a third of the world’s population, was not the sort of information to which the oh-goody-this-must-be-the-end mentality paid much attention. AIDS was tailor-made for the fantasies of the religious right, because it was genitally transmitted.

  To more than one congregation on more than one occasion, Buddy had proclaimed, “Man had congress with sheep and generated syphilis. Man had congress with monkeys and generated AIDS.”

  “So what does that tell us about chicken pox?” Ellen Cherry had asked one day.

  “Yeah,” said Boomer Petway, “and how about the first man who ever said he was ’sick as a dog’? Was he confessing to something? Was that the origin of collie-ra?”

  Ellen Cherry: “And was Rhett Butler the pervert who spread scarlet fever?”

  Boomer: “And if you had congress with jazz musicians, would you come down with thelonious mumps?”

  Well, never mind those two. There was, indeed, an epidemic loose in the land, and if it was hardly apocalyptic, if its victims were few compared to pestilences of the past (just as the casualties of the two world wars were slight compared, for example, to those of the Manchu-Chinese War of 1644), it was nonetheless serious and scary; all the more so because it was sexually transmitted. It led children to associate love with death.

  However, it was neither AIDS nor ninja nooky that felled Spike Cohen. While a frantic Ellen Cherry was on her way to the lobby to call for an ambulance, Spike regained consciousness and staggered into the bathroom, where he passed a kidney stone as big as the Ritz.

  Within a few days, Spike was hurting again. A second stone, a calcium oxalate crystal, to be precise, lodged in his ureter and, like a pirate radio station, went on the air with a sporadic signal and a musical format programmed by Nazi biologists and prelates from the Inquisition. Spike was admitted to a hospital, where, fighting sound with sound, a technician operating a litho-tripter aimed high-intensity sonar at the caterwauling stone. When the bombardment abated and the decibels cleared, the crystalline concretion remained, nesting in the tube between kidney and bladder like a stork in a chimney.

  Medical generals ordered an invasion. A spring-loaded wire device resembling an egg whisk was shoved up Spike’s penis and through his bladder on a mission to capture the stone. When it was withdrawn, however, its trap was empty, and X rays revealed that the vicious barnacle, a good six millimeters in circumference, hadn’t budged. Spike was then readied for full-scale surgery. The operation proceeded smoothly until a doctor with a shaky hand (probably the result of golf elbow) accidentally severed the soda-straw ureter, a boo-boo that went unnoticed by the medical team (probably because it was arguing over the fortunes of the Giants and the Jets).

  That evening, Spike developed a headache and a slight fever. The nurses didn’t regard the condition as unusual, not even when it persisted. Nearly three days passed before it dawned on them that he hadn’t urinated since prior to surgery. A resident physician suspected that a third stone was stuck in the uretero-vesical pipe, but X rays failed to turn up one. Bloodwork was requested. The lab fired back an analysis that made Spike’s bloodstream read like the gutters of Calcutta. His nitrate levels were practically off the chart, and small wonder, since urine, unable to reach the bladder, had been emptying into his abdominal cavity at the rate of eight hundred cc’s a day. In other words, he had enough hot piss in his stomach to fill the combustion chambers of several powerful motorcycles.

  By then, Spike was severely nauseated, his face and extremities were swollen, and he was seized by mild convulsions. Medics swarmed over him as if he were the first tee at a brand-new country club. Simultaneously, he was hooked up to a dialysis machine and given a blood transfusion. On the way to the operating theater, his gurney looked like the lead wagon in a caravan of sterilized gypsies. They cut him open again, drained his stomach, and spliced his ureter. It was touch and go for a few hours, but he survived.

  His first words to Ellen Cherry, when she was allowed to visit the following day, were: “Hoo boy! I’ve been shot in the head, I’ve been treated for kidney stones. Shot in the head is better.”

  Robust though he was, the triple whammy of kidney stones, uremia, and encore surgery exacted a steep levy on Spike Cohen’s constitution. His eleven-day stay in the hospital was followed by a month’s recuperation at his Upper West Side flat. Ellen Cherry nursed him during the day, his son and daughter-in-law at night. His son wasted hours trying to convince him to sue his doctors. “A bad hospital it may be, but the New York state lottery it’s not,” said Spike. “I’m earning my money the old-fashioned way.”

  Abu visited the convalescent whenever he could, but he had his hands full at the restaurant. Following the publication of the article in the Village Voice, Salome’s fame had spread. Patronag
e of Isaac & Ishmael’s had been jacked up another notch. Abu made a rule that nobody could be seated in the dining room unless they ordered dinner, yet even that harrowing prospect failed to dissuade the crowds. By seven on Friday and Saturday nights, there wasn’t an empty seat in the place. Bribe and wheedle though he might, Abu could not influence the bandleader to influence Salome to dance on additional evenings. “I will speak to her from the heart,” the toothless musician would promise, pocketing the fifty-dollar bill Abu had offered. “But she is a young girl, she has her studies, she needs her sleep.”

  Neatly dressed in one of the dark blue pinstriped wool suits that he now wore in all seasons, Abu would sit by Spike’s bed, cheering him with tales of the I & I’s success and of the attention Salome was calling to their exercise in brotherhood. Abu complained often that he couldn’t find a competent partner on the tennis court, and that little white lie cheered Spike as well. Abu’s visits were short, however. During most of the daylight hours, Ellen Cherry attended to Spike all by herself. She fed him, bathed him, medicated him, mixed him weak rum punches, and read to him from the poetry of Shakespeare and Pablo Neruda.

  “When I was a small boy,” said Spike, “my favorite poem was ’There was an old woman who lived in a shoe.’”

  “I’m not surprised,” said Ellen Cherry.

  “I also liked the ’this little piggy went to market’ routine, but it made my family very nervous. Especially the ’wee wee wee’ part.”

  Although it left her time for nothing else except her job, Ellen Cherry didn’t resent the weeks that she spent as Spike’s nursemaid. However, the experience permanently altered the nature of their relationship. Her sexual feelings for him simply evaporated. Perhaps it was his helplessness, perhaps it was an overdose of intimacy. She didn’t know what extinguished it, but she knew that the fire was out. They avoided any discussion of the matter, yet Spike obviously sensed the plunge in erotic temperature. As much as he might have yearned to, he made no effort to whistle for the dolphin or to throw an electric blanket over its cool, slick back. Ellen Cherry and Spike remained fast friends, but never again did they ride out to mid-ocean, where the salt spray glittered in her neo-hussy rouge as he trolled for that radiant sea-thing that many men have tasted but no man has fully seen.