Stabs at Happiness (21 page)

Elements of timing, luck ride with you. Be aware of color combinations—you'll look especially good in indigo, electric blue. Intuition will serve as reliable guide.

Paulie sort of resembled the late actor Alfred Paget as he had appeared, with mascara and a phony beard, in D.W. Griffith's
Intolerance
, playing the pleasure-loving Belshazzar.

Kimberly, on the other hand, as the Princess Beloved, was much prettier than the actress Seena Owen had been in the same role back in 1915. Maybe Kim was not as pretty as Mae Marsh, or Blanche Sweet, or the Gish sisters at their best, but she was definitely prettier than Miss Owen.

At least once in her life every woman in the land was supposed to prostitute herself in the Temple of Ishtar. However, wealthy women took all the precautions they could to avoid an encounter with an unwanted stranger by surrounding themselves with a great number of female attendants. They would have made an arrangement with someone, perhaps even their husbands, to meet them there.

The majority of women, though, adorned in their best finery and jewels, seated themselves in the holy enclosure and awaited whatever partner the gods might see to provide. A man had only to toss a coin (of any denomination, though as a token of respect a higher value might bring one greater joy), and utter, “
The goddess Ishtar prosper thee
,” and he could not be refused. The beautiful women were taken care of swiftly; ugly ones might wait a long time.

Beverly, barely five feet tall, hair cut short so that she looked like a cute little boy, went into Union Square Park and bought some downers from a black guy in a knit cap.

“You gonna be here later, case my friends want some?”

“Sure man,” the guy said, shifting his weight back and forth from one foot to the other, perhaps in some correspondence with his languid chant “Ups and Downs; Ups and Downs.”

Beverly had smoked some dope about an hour before. Her head was still pleasantly buzzed. She only asked the guy if he'd be there later to try to insure that it wasn't a burn. The pills looked right, but you could never be one hundred per cent sure. She'd been to this park often enough she shouldn't get ripped off. She wasn't sure if this guy recognized her or not – but then, she wasn't sure if he recognized anyone.

“Hey, don't you usually have a dog?”

He smiled then. “Yeah, I do.”

“What happened to him?”

“He got sick.”

“That's too bad.”

“Sure is, man. Protects me from Big City White Devils, shit like that. I think someone put a spell on him. But he's getting better, gonna be all right. Had to get me some of the right medicine, that's all.”

“Well, I'm glad to hear he's better. Catch you later.”

“Later, yeah.
Ups and Downs
.”

In another scene, the god Shamash was seated, while a person half-man and half-bird was brought to him.

Jean-Luc was not sexually attracted to Kim. It was too hard to tell her from a real girl. In fact, it could not be done in ordinary circumstances, unless you cast a critical eye. Jean-Luc occasionally slept with girls, teenyboppers, pulling down their jeans from behind, especially if there was another boy in the bed, but in such cases he preferred to enter the girls as he did the boys, inhabit their rectums while using slow friction on sensitive sphincters.

Dark salty vaginas had unfortunate associations.
Is the rectum a grave?
Norman Mailer thought so or something. In
An American Dream
his hero while fucking went from the Cunt into the Asshole,
from Heaven into Hell
, a description which seemed over-wrought. Protest too much and all that.

The Harem of the King were all mannequins, as were the members of the Royal Court. They were all individually and extravagantly clad, literally dripping with cheap costume jewelry and phony strings of pearls. Paul rolled around on the floor with one or the other of them, fought with them, struck them, whipped them, shouted at them, finally allegedly screwing one in the ass.

“There, you fucker, take that! There! How do you like that? Well, there's more where that came from. If you don't start acting more lively you're going to find yourself in some
Pretty Deep Shit
. You ungrateful bitches. I hate you. You're going to be sorry you ever met me. You should have treated me better when you had the chance. Just you wait. You'll be up there on the platform at the Slave Auction, begging me to forgive you, to take you back, while some greasy Phoenician licks his lips and throws his drachmas on the block. You know what they do in Phoenicia? Do you? You don't want to know. Really. You can't imagine. You think we've got perverts here, just wait till you land in Phoenicia. You'll wish you were back here sucking my toes.”

Zoom in on a capsized, impassive mannequin.

Babylonia, thanks to a sophisticated system of irrigation based on a clever network of canals, waterways, and dams, was in its time the richest granary in the world. With the final fall of Babylon in 538 B.C., the irrigation system became neglected. The Tigris and Euphrates periodically overflowed and even changed course altogether, flooding the region without control. By the 20th century, the area had become a desolate and dreary landscape, a far cry from the lush farmlands of so long ago.