by Tom Robbins
Are you putting me on? asked Ellen Cherry Charles. But then a carload of loudmouths drove by, chanting the score of the Super Bowl game, and she heard nothing further, nor could she generate another pertinent thought.
THE NEXT EVENING, she flew to Jerusalem. Her mama paid for part of her expenses, Spike Cohen paid the rest. Her benefactors drove her to JFK and saw her off.
On the way home from the airport, in the backseat of a limo, Patsy and Spike fell in love. They later married, settling in Brooklyn Heights, where Patsy took belly dancing lessons and where her white go-go boots finally got the attention they deserved.
The mere thought of it would one day cause Ellen Cherry to lose her lifelong fondness for shoes.
RUSTY METAL CAUGHT the morning sun like a ruby brooch catching the eye of a burglar. Had Can o’ Beans been human, he/she might have stretched and yawned. It was a new day in Jerusalem, a city that, in one state of disrepair or another, had seen so very many new days; and in a rock pile a couple hundred yards west of the Jaffa Gate, the bean tin, or what remained of it, greeted this morning, as it did every morning, with the rusted-out, inanimate equivalent of a grin.
The Atlantic, from whose waters Conch Shell could not fully shield it, had taken a terrible toll on the can. Oxidation had enveloped it like an orange mitten enveloping a fist, and then disintegration had set in. “I’m just a tired old bum beside a railroad track,” Can o’ Beans told a beloved companion. “A busted, rusted derelict fit for nothing but the two-bit harmonica junkyard blues.” Of course, that lament was fanciful, if not wholly tongue in cheek.
The hope that Israel’s arid climate might extend the tin’s life expectancy for another six months could not alter the fact that it was a goner; encrusted, crushed, cracked, and worn as thin as the whiskers on a billy goat. Still, it was happy with its final resting place. Can o’ Beans, you see, loved, absolutely adored, the statue of Pales.
Painted Stick and Conch Shell, who had had little trouble locating each other once they were back on their old stomping grounds, had invited him/her to accompany them to the Dome of the Rock, where now they were in some manner or other unofficially ensconced, awaiting the advent of the Third Temple, in whatever form it might take. Grateful for their offer, Can o’ Beans had nevertheless declined. “I’d just be in the way,” he/she said. “I have nothing to contribute. And the Messiah, should he—or she—or it—decide to put in an appearance, doesn’t need rubbish like me underfoot. Besides, I like it right here in this little plaza. Just look at that statue! How mischievous it is, how lurid and full of life. And it’s androgynous! It’s AC/DC! In regard to gender, that donkey covers the waterfront. This is my Temple of Jerusalem.”
The sun climbed higher over the most revered, most bloodied town on earth. The sun felt at home in Jerusalem. The sun had connections there. And though it was a long way from a Safeway shelf, Can o’ Beans felt at home there, too. He/she sat among the rocks, as still as an inanimate object ought to be, enjoying the warmth, admiring Pales, and observing the people who came to photograph or point at Pales, many of them with an air of outrage.
About that time, Can o’ Beans noticed Boomer Petway. He/she noticed Boomer not because he/she remembered him from their Airstream turkey ride—Boomer was in disguise now and hardly could be recognized as the fellow who’d deserted him/her in that cave after so thoroughly and entertainingly partaking of his wife—but, rather, noticed him because of his gait. “Isn’t it odd,” he/she said to his/her nursemaid and companion, “that every morning about this time a different person comes and walks around and around the monument with the same identical limp. Oh, what a marvelously weird place this is!”
Jerusalem didn’t seem so weird to Ellen Cherry. Where she sat in the overgrown garden of the little stone house that Boomer had shared with Amos Zif, the vectors of death cults, past or present, did not reach her. The February sunshine was just strong enough to buzz in her plasma, and the light was almost impossibly clear. From the weedy patio, there spread a field of rosemary and thistle. Honeysuckle wound bureaucratically around the trunks of Persian lilac and wind-bent pine. Birds chirped messages older than prophecy, older than tourism, and even the furry black centipedes that scurried along the crumbling garden wall appeared benign. She sipped her tea, drew on the pages of her mental sketch pad, and absorbed through every pore that she could open, the ancient golden light.
Ellen Cherry was awaiting the return of her husband. Each morning, after they’d had their sex and breakfast, Boomer dug into his spy bag, selected a disguise, and went down to the plaza by the Old City’s Jaffa Gate to ascertain that nobody had bombed, censored, or vandalized his creation during the night.
From the moment of its unveiling, a fortnight prior, the piece had generated an uproar. Much of the adverse reaction was elicited by Pales’ two-for-the-price-of-one frontal nudity, but many also took offense on racial grounds, the figure being both Arabic and Jewish. However, few in government or elsewhere had yet caught on that the prancing donkey-person represented for Arab and Jew a common ancestral deity, because few had been taught that it was for the prince of jackasses, the buck-toothed empress of jennies, that their solemnized and contested land had, appropriately or not, been named. When that information emerged, either Jerusalemites would lighten up or the falafel would really hit the fan. In anticipation of the latter, Zif had embarked on an extended tour of France. Boomer wasn’t worried. What could they do to him? He’d been ordered to leave the country in thirty days anyhow, as a result of the shipment of Armageddon paraphernalia that he had received from the late Buddy Winkler.
In spite of everything, Boomer had hopes for the survival of his sculpture, so he ventured out morning after morning to survey its condition. When he came home, he delighted in making love to Ellen Cherry while still wearing the disguise du jour. She admitted that that could occasionally be exciting, such as the time that he’d been in drag as a nun, but today he was dressed as a municipal rat catcher, and she knew that she was going to have to draw the line.
Beyond that, the future was uncertain. Doubtlessly, she would leave Jerusalem along with Boomer, although her curiosity about the new dimension of being that was aborning there had hardly been satisfied. They talked about building a house near Seattle somewhere; a roomy, rustic lodge on one of those evergreen hills, if they could find one that the timber companies hadn’t skinned alive. There, with her eye on the ball, she would paint. She’d paint and paint and paint. She would dedicate herself to . . . well, she’d have to call it “beauty,” for want of a better word. She wouldn’t be sentimental about it, or self-righteous, or even spiritual and pure. And she wouldn’t get defensive when ridiculed or misunderstood. Beauty she would not carry like a banner, nor would she take refuge from the world in it like a hermit in a shack. Beauty would just be her everyday thing.
Meanwhile, there was so much to think about. All that had been revealed to her—and to who knew how many others?—when Salome danced the Dance of the Seven Veils. Those revelations might require her to grow in unexpected directions. The others might similarly grow. What effect, if any, that mutant growth might have on the culture at large, in the earth’s “Final Days,” remained to be seen. Meanwhile, the garden there in Jerusalem, the sunny patio there at the cervix of the world, was a fine place to ponder it all.
Ellen Cherry was relaxed, calm, at peace. The roller coaster ride was over. Those years of feeling on top of things one week, squashed by them the next, had fallen away like the pages of a calendar. Those bizarre events that had haunted her in New York were swiftly fading memories. From now on—she could sense it—her existence would be stable, maybe even staunch; the life of a relatively normal artist in which relatively normal events transpired. She sighed like a feather pillow being fluffed by an old Norwegian maid. She took a long, slow sip of tea.
Moments later, Boomer bolted into the garden. It didn’t much look like Boomer but it was he. He was carrying something, presenting it to her like a gift. God,
she hoped it wasn’t the tail of a dead rat.
“Looky here, bagel britches!” he practically shouted. “Looky what I found for you lying in the rubble on the edge of Pales Plaza. It’s a spoon! A little ol’ spoon! Exactly like the one we lost in that cave that day! I mean exactly!”
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TOM ROBBINS has been called “a vital natural resource” by The Portland Oregonian, “one of the wildest and most entertaining novelists in the world” by the Financial Times of London, and “the most dangerous writer in the world today” by Fernanda Pivano of Italy’s Corriere della Sera. A Southerner by birth, Robbins has lived in and around Seattle since 1962.
BOOKS BY TOM ROBBINS
Another Roadside Attraction
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues
Still Life with Woodpecker
Jitterbug Perfume
Skinny Legs and All
Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates
Villa Incognito
Nationwide Praise for
SKINNY LEGS AND ALL
“A PHANTASMAGORICAL, POLITICALLY CHARGED TALE YOU WISH WOULD NEVER END
ROBBINS’S LUST FOR LAUGHS IS UNDIMINISHED; THIS PRESCRIPTION FOR SANITY COULDN’T BE BETTER.”—
Publishers Weekly
“TOM ROBBINS AT HIS BEST—PLAYFUL, SWEET, SMART, AND FULL OF THAT OLD ROBBINS MAGIC.”—
Seattle Post Intelligencer
“A GOD OF ELOQUENCE
ROBBINS REFINES THE GOOFY INTO REVELATIONS.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“AN ENCYCLOPEDIC MASTERWORK RIGHT UP THERE WITH PYNCHON AND JOYCE.”—
Timothy Leary
“DAZZLING . . . SERIOUS . . . BUT VERY FUNNY.”—The Bergen Record
“HILARIOUS. WHO BUT ROBBINS CAN MAKE A BOOK OF IDEAS SO MUCH FUN TO READ?"—
Milwaukee Journal
“FUNNY, SEXY, IMAGINATIVE AND PLAYFUL, YET HAS AN UNDERLYING TEXTURE BOTH BEAUTIFUL AND PROFOUND.”—
Neil Peart, lyricist, Rush
Some of the works of art described in these pages are fictionalized exaggerations of pieces originally created by Patti Warashina, Fred Bauer, and Norma Rosen. The author salutes them.
SKINNY LEGS AND ALL
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published May 1990
Bantam paperback edition / April 1991
Bantam trade paperback edition / December 1995
Bantam trade paperback reissue / May 2003
Published by Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1990 by Tibetan Peach Pie, Inc.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 89-18309
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eISBN: 978-0-553-89793-7
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