“It’s because you’re not used to being naked,” Kelly had told me before taking a hike with Steve.
Lamenting the absence of an orgia, I had tried explaining there was a more traditional explanation.
“Did that thing go down yet?” Sandy said, trying and not succeeding in her attempt to appear natural. The main problem involved the positioning of her arms. Across the chest they made her appear apprehensive. Dangling at the sides did not feel right, as though hands were meant to be placed in pockets.
“I do not think it is going down anytime soon,” I said. Like some giant divining rod near Niagara Falls, a part of me was pulled toward the volleyball game. Although the proportions of this obeliscal symbol of power and life, this conduit of bliss, this meaty connector of present and future, are of supreme importance, beyond a certain degree it can become a burden, a veritable millstone.
“No one gets a hard-on at a nudist colony.”
“Is that one of their dogmas? Is that in their manifesto? That has the delicious stupidity of bourgeoisie oppression of the proletariat. Apparently I have not transcended this particular hang-up. Not to worry, for it is natural, not sexual or erotic.” I stepped from behind the shrub and stood next to Sandy with arms outstretched. “Much like the emperor with no clothes, I shall go unnoticed. The oblivious Rainbow Gardeners will attribute the condition to humidity, the barometric pressure, or some other phenomenon. I wonder if they have alternative explanations for pregnancy, such as tidal patterns or moon phases.”
“Oh hell. Get behind the bush. We can’t walk around yet.”
Realizing there was only one certain means of diminishing my prodigious hang-up, I plunged headfirst into the center of the storm. “Did you see Kelly’s awesome little tattoo? It’s a butterfly.”
“You hate tattoos on women. How many times have you told me it looks tacky? That’s the lamest hypocrisy and you words words words words words words words …”
And in less than a minute I emerged from the shrub with flaccid innocence and we commenced our promenade. An article in Scientific American once declared peripheral vision to be illusory. That article was wrong.
“Behold the ravages of gravity,” I said, squeezing Sandy’s hand as an elderly man jumped to catch a boomerang.
“Is that going to happen to you?”
“Verily, gravity is a heartless scourge.”
“I don’t know if I like this place.”
“Traditions are not created willy-nilly,” I said, staring at cloud formations while testing my fledgling peripheral powers on a bronzed woman with barely discernible tan lines lathering herself with buttery lotion. “They arise via a long and rigorous process of selection. To shun a tradition perfected by the Greeks and Romans in favor of this nonsense is no less calumnious than the destruction of the nuclear family.”
“I’m not saying I’d prefer group sex. I’m just agreeing there’s something freaky about this.”
I tested the icy water of a lake and looked away from two male manatees splashing after a football. “Group sex is not an encompassing summary of the tradition. Heavy petting amidst feasting and imbibing is perhaps a better description, which, you must admit, is infinitely preferable to wandering about in some Garden of asexual Eden. Clothing is another of mankind’s hallowed traditions. Contrary to these silly people, it is not a hang-up. One of its purposes is specifically erotic in nature: Who wants to receive an unwrapped present? In addition to protecting us from the elements, it inflames the imagination in a way that a dangling scrotum or sagging bosom does not. This hatred of tradition plagues us in such a multitude of forms a man scarcely knows where to begin a critique. A pattern emerges: arrogant little know-it-alls toss aside centuries of established wisdom with catastrophic results. Consider the revolutions in France, Russia, and America, the catastrophic 1960s, the substitution of polytheism with monotheism, women shaving their pubic region. I am not referring to Kelly. These women are hippies and they’re doing it. From whence does this urge to desecrate Nature’s beauty arise.”
“It’s a porn thing.”
“Of course. Standards in our republic are decreed by pornographer kings. Please find me some hemlock.”
“Hey you two,” Kelly yelled to us. “This guy knows where we can find drum trees.”
She stood beside an RV with Steve and a cinnamon man with no tan lines. A scraggly gray beard dipped below his sternum. Gandhi was muscle-bound by comparison. He watched Sandy approach from behind mirrored sunglasses.
“Again lament the depredation of gravity,” I whispered to Sandy. “Swing low sweet chariot.”
“Knock it off,” she said, suppressing a giggling jag, a conniption that once initiated had a slow rate of entropy and could not be prematurely terminated.
Steve introduced us to Clicky, who had been with the Rainbow Gardeners when they were called Sunshine Farmers. “The magic drum trees of azure,” he said in a slow drawl, leaning on a walking stick topped by a brass skull. “There’s a grove not too far from here. You know anything about them? Gourds dangle from the branches and beat against the trunk. Squirrels get knocked out or killed trying to eat them. The Native Americans thought the ones that succeeded were sacred.”
Sandy and Kelly stood with arms crossed, enthralled. To debar a return from my hang-up, I avoided the sight of Kelly, looking away from the smooth, impossibly narrow entrance to heaven, which was not obscured by any dark mediums. To dispel dreamscapes of them rubbing whipped cream on each other and feeding me strawberries, I initiated a dialogue. “The wind blows the gourds against the trunk. They make a drumming sound when they hit. If that constitutes magic the magician should stick with card tricks.”
“How can normal gourds whack a squirrel on the head?” said Clicky.
“The sheer number of both ensures that some will be bonked. This was probably an early form of gambling. Archaeologists should dig for a terracotta Bingo parlor. You are not suggesting the trees aim at them.”
“The indigenous people believed they did. I doubt if you’re any wiser, son. No offense.”
“None taken. But you must acknowledge the ludicrous nature of the traditional story.”
“It comes to us from thousands of years of their wisdom. You think you can just throw all that away?”
Sandy flashed a wicked grin, as though all traditions were somehow equal.
“It is explained by a drug in the seeds, which deranged the squirrels and their audience,” I said. “No man has greater sympathy for tradition than I, but a line has to be drawn.”
“How do you draw it? And where? And says who? You never seen them with your own eyes, have you?” He took a step forward. His scrotum swung in the breeze like a pendulum. “You just read about them in books, maybe seen a PBS special. It ain’t the same. I’ve hid in the brush and watched for hours, watched the gourds beat faster as the squirrels approached. I’ve seen squirrels knocked on the head twenty times get right back up and try it again. The ones that don’t get eaten by wolves.”
“The trees are purple?” said Sandy.
“They don’t have a name for this color,” Clicky said. “The settlers called them azure, but that’s just fancy talk.”
I yawned. “Because of their proximity to water a cerulean faculty has been selected for by evolution. Their relationship with squirrels is a classic example of symbiosis. The squirrels spread the seeds in the gourds. The trees enhance the squirrel gene pool by eliminating all but the best and brightest squirrels.”
With the predictability of integers Steve said, “What if a human eats the seeds?”
“You don’t wanna do that, son.”
“Is it bad?” said Kelly.
“No, it’s good, but it’s too good,” said Clicky. “It don’t do the same thing to people that it does to squirrels. It was part of a sacred ceremony.”
“Edwin Schwankmeyer documented their psychoactive properties over a century ago,” I said, smiling at a young lady walking past. Below her pierced naval
, four tiny tattoos depicted an animated sequence of dancing bears. The first bear, red, stood with feet planted. The second bear, green, lifted one leg. The third —
“Why don’t you take a picture,” said Sandy.
“Schwankmeyer, in his watershed Seedling Papers, compared the affective properties to nutmeg.”
“What’s that like?” said Steve.
“If a totalitarian regime permits its sale at grocery stores how fun can it be?”
“The indigenous people believed that spirits lived underground,” Clicky told his captive audience. “The same spirits that pushed their crops up through the soil also controlled the branches of the drum trees. They called them the fingers of the gods.”
“How could gods live underground? Were they moles? Who would revere such preposterous beings?” I prepared to demonstrate the metaphysical absurdity of this when the aroma of grilled food called to me. While they plied the directions to the secret grove from Clicky, I attempted to establish a tab with a man barbecuing Tofu shish kebob. The futility of my generous offers to pay him birthed a revelation: the Rainbow Gardeners’ banishment of all pockets was merely an attempt to subvert the tradition of capitalism.
• • •
Enervated by cannabis, Sandy left the three of us seated around the fire and entered our tent shortly after nightfall. Kelly and Steve smoked more marijuana as we listened to the sound of fingers tapping. We planned on visiting the nearby grove in the morning when there would be fewer scavenging predators.
“Dude, I don’t care what you say. There is something far-out about those trees.”
“I would be the last to dispute the far-outness,” I said. “It is a question of the fundamental explanation for it. Just because they are not fingers of the gods does not mean they are boring. Must everything have an outlandish tale to explain it? What is the Grand Canyon, the vagina of the gods? This anthropomorphic tendency is the bane of science.”
While my crass denouncement initiated a giggling jag in the reefer fiends, an owl perched in the uppermost branches of a pine. Its amber eyes glowered down at us. Steve reclined on his side and I added a thickset log to the fire, hoping the crackling would serve as a protective cushion of white noise to the menacing drums, which were not commensurate with the wind.
“You gonna eat the seeds?” Kelly asked Steve.
“I don’t know. Clicky said the men from the tribe would see who could climb the trunk and get them.”
“How did they avoid being thrashed by the gourds?” I asked, watching Kelly’s blues eyes search the tongues of flame, as her foremothers did for thousands of generations. (Though she looked decidedly better without her clothes, this in no way detracts from my general critique of nudism.)
“That was part of the ceremony,” said Steve. “It was a rite of passage. You weren’t a man until you climbed the trunk and picked a gourd and ate the seeds. Different injuries meant different things. The ones who lost an eye were brave, but the ones who lost both were considered visionaries because the tree gave them sight-with-no-sight.”
“I shudder to think what befell the ones who used a pole to knock them down,” I said.
“Are you gonna try the seedlings, Petronius?” said Kelly.
“Barge into an alien culture and exhume an extinct tradition for the sake of catching a buzz? It may have been a sacred rite of passage for them. To us it is a bizarre, masochistic curio. Though I did enjoy bungee jumping once.”
“Man, Sandy’s got her hands full,” said Steve. “Why do you have to knock everything?”
“Your reverence for their tradition is misplaced. If a man is raised to honor certain beliefs, it is unlikely that he will question them. Consequently, we should feel sympathy for those at the beck and call of ruthless mores. We should not humor or emulate them.”
“Why is that tradition worse than any other?” said Steve.
“That is the question,” I said, jumping to my feet. “Since both Reason and emotion can lead men astray, the steadfast rudder of tradition is not to be shunned thoughtlessly. Ideas tested and perfected in the great laboratory of Time deserve precedence.”
“Yeah, and you’re pissin’ all over theirs,” said Steve.
“The questions of consummate importance are how to select from competing traditions and when Reason should override tradition,” I explained. Steve, Kelly and the owl sat spellbound as I elucidated Petronius’ Criteria for Tradition Selection and Rejection (which shall be disambiguated later, when it will not forestall the spellbinding sequence of events that follows).
• • •
At the cue of Steve’s snores, Kelly moved closer to me. “I’ve been thinking about what you said this morning,”
I surveyed the armada of profundities that had left my port during the day but could not find an obvious flagship. “And what was that?”
“About how everyone would kill if they knew they could get away with it,” she said, misstating Sandy’s misunderstanding of my simple exposition. “I think you’re right.”
While I massaged the bridge of my nose, Reason reminded me that the day is the time for refutations and the night is the time for other things. A man might just as well juggle squid than philosophize with reefer fiends. They not only won’t comprehend his scintillating analyses; they won’t remember his corrections. He is condemned to begin de novo every few sentences. “Have you ever thought about it?” I said.
She threw her hair back and stared into the fire. Orange phantoms possessed her eyes. “Just between us?”
“Well of course, a secret,” I said, clasping her hand.
“One night I was watching Steve sleep. We’d had a fight. I don’t know why I thought of this. It just popped in there.”
“You are not responsible for your thoughts,” I said, touching her shoulder.
“What if they’re evil?”
“Thoughts are neither good nor evil. Only actions can be evil. What thought, that you could not help having, popped into your head through no fault of your own?”
(If the Reader wishes to look down his gin-blossomed nose at me for espousing half-baked doctrines I do not even hold for the purpose of relieving a priapism inflicted by a thoughtless little tart who spent the better part of the day parading around in the buff, I challenge him to recall some of his own pickup lines and compare them. The very thought makes me wince: “Gee, you sure are beautiful. Are you a model? No, really, I think I seen you in the Sears catalogue.”)
“I thought, just for a second, that if something happened to him no one would know. We met on the tour in St. Louis. It’s not like anyone knows we’re going out. I’d just head home.” She smiled. Like the ripples on a stream, her dimples tugged my mighty divining rod.
“Know one would know but you,” I said. “Was it the ability to get away with it that thrilled you, like when you shoplifted when you were little?”
“Maybe.”
“Or was it because you would have a tremendous secret trapped inside, one you could never — no matter how intense the need — share with anyone else?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t think about it very long.”
“No one would have seen it but you.”
“No one would have seen it but me.”
I tried to discern the pattern of Sandy’s snores in the tent. The ominous drumming, in conjunction with Steve’s raucous gurgles, gave me little confidence regarding the depth of her unconsciousness. I surmised that my window was narrow and closing fast.
“Why do you think about this stuff?”
“It is a subspecies of a general observation. Having a secret you want to share but cannot is, by turns, maddening and exhilarating. The border between misery and ecstasy is porous.”
“What are you saying? This is why people do bad things, to have a secret?”
“It opens a private world inside that no other soul can enter, both Eden and Elba.”
She stared at me. I kissed her.
“Petronius! Don’t.”
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br /> “No one is seeing this but us.”
“Is that what the thrill comes from? Or is it from not getting caught?”
“Both, but adequately describing the circles of this Paradiso would require a poet, the likes of which has not been seen for centuries.” Her misgiving gave way to silent endorsement. Shadows danced on the pebbled dirt beside her head like jealous specters and the magnetic force deep within the earth pulled me into her again and again and again.
O the ecstasy of the Unnumbered Petronius Sensation: the joy of getting away with something. Often it is only experienced in flashes, moments of overconfidence when one is unconcerned with apprehension. Its intensity is usually but not necessarily proportionate to the severity of the offense. If Sandy had awakened, nothing short of military intervention would have spared me from her wrath. (And what would the drive home have been like? The testimony of Hippocrates would not have sufficed to persuade her that Satyriasis is an affliction, not a freely chosen state.) How cruel of Nature to place the sweetest fruit on such dangerous branches.
• • •
I squeezed into the coffin-sized tent only to discover Sandy on my side. I squirmed restlessly until I found myself walking down the street toward her parents’ house. The fact that I was not driving gave me the requisite insight to avoid another nightmare. But why was I headed there? Who dreams about his girlfriend? The whole point is the attainment of what we do not have.
The screen door slammed behind me and I heard splashes in the tub. An epiphany struck. The cuckoo clock clucked “Ode to Joy” and I removed my clothes in the hallway and entered the bathroom where dozens of candles illuminated in hideous detail Sandy’s ex reclining in bubbly water in a pose intended to appear seductive. I fell back and clutched the doorframe.
“Jablonski,” he yelled, sitting up so abruptly the water doused most of the candles. “What are you doing here? You gonna steal Sandy from me again? You’re a class act, a real class act.”
“What are you doing in a dream of mine?” I had to send him on his way before the wonderful part could commence. “Where is Sandy’s sister?”
“I thought you dropped that algebra class,” he said, wrapping himself in a towel. “Then you show up for the final exam to cheat off my girlfriend and ask her out.”
The Annals Page 17
