The Televisionary Oracle (3 page)

In the third panel his abductor has dropped him from a great height
head-first down into a giant goblet on the ground. She’s saying, “Into the Grail with you.” The fourth panel shows the same scene, only now it’s encapsulated within a TV around which a group of women is sitting and applauding. “Our very first volunteer!” one woman’s balloon exults.

What gives me the chills more than anything else about this artwork is that it has an eerie similarity to a certain set of events in my own past.

When I was a kid I loved six subjects: girls, astronomy, music, baseball, dreams, and vultures. At age nine, I was the founding father of the Vulture Culture Club, which included among its products a series of homemade comic books not unlike the work Rapunzel has splayed on the bathroom wall.

To this day, no one but me has ever seen those carefully drawn creations. Everyone, especially my parents, hated my fascination with the lowly buzzard, so I learned to be covert. My entire oeuvre, collectively titled “Raptor Rapture,” was kept in a locked metal box which took me three weeks’ worth of allowance to buy. Each installment in the series had a complex storyline, but of equal importance in the overall message was my benevolent propaganda. I often reiterated the fact that though from one point of view the vulture is the ugliest of birds, with its bald head and scraggly neck, it also happens to be the most graceful of all the soaring raptors. If you didn’t know that their appearance in the sky is an announcement of death, you’d marvel at the long gliding dance of their flight.

Another fact about vultures which intrigued me was that they’re misunderstood helpers. They don’t, after all, kill the things they devour. In fact, most are peaceful creatures that never hurt a living thing. Their job is to assist nature in processing carrion; to clean up the messes that others have made.

But of all my reasons for becoming obsessed with vultures, my recurring dreams about them were the strongest. Though I shiver whenever I think of them now.

“Well, old boy,” Rapunzel sighs, interrupting my reverie, “I’m quite impressed with your testimony about Lourdes. So impressed—and I assure you this is highly irregular—that I’ve decided to qualify you
for admission right here and now, without submitting a full report to the usual committees.”

Suddenly she sinks to her knees in front of me.

“Qualify me for what?” I gulp, trying to prevent my body from convulsing with lust.

“By the authority vested in me as Supreme Arbiter of the Feminist Bureau of Standards, I hereby declare you a candidate for admission into the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail.”

Pulling my shirt out of my pants, she undoes its lower buttons and writes on my abdomen with the marker: WANNABE. Above it she also draws the profile of a vulture woman similar to the one on the wall.

As she finishes and stands up, she gives me one of the strangest looks I’ve ever seen. It’s simultaneously conspiratorial, full of compassion, amused, didactic, and, if I’m not mistaken, a bit lustful. “Next question. Would you be interested in taking on the power of those who bleed but do not die?” she asks.

“And what the holy eucharist is that supposed to mean?”

She pulls a smooth, grey, oval rock out of her pants pocket and hands it to me. It’s about six inches high and three inches wide, with two flat surfaces on which a text is printed in small red letters.

“Where do I sign up?” I say when I’ve finished reading the rock for the second time.

“If you truly think you’re up for it, there’d be some preparatory work you’d have to master.”

Up till this moment, I’ve been nurturing the fantasy that Rapunzel is a bullshit artist of the first magnitude—a play-acting lunatic as devoted to creating hyper-real performance art on the spur of the moment as I am. My confidence in this interpretation has been shaken somewhat by the speed and ease with which she materialized the mature vulture masterpiece on the wall. It seemed rehearsed. Now, with the appearance of the “menarche for men” announcement, I’m
forced to consider the possibility that Rapunzel’s behavior is at least partially premeditated.

Whether it is or not, I can’t let that issue dampen my own contribution to the entertainment.

“Supreme Arbiter,” I say, “I’d kiss your buttocks and wear a cardboard crown from Burger King and write a whole album’s worth of songs just for you if that’s what it took to earn the right to a female-mediated experience that no man has had since 4323
B.C.”

She points to her ankle-high army boots. “You are indeed precocious, my boy, but not so much that you get to kiss the buttocks of the Supreme Arbiter on the first date. I will, however, let you take a stab at another part of the holy vehicle. See if you can transmit your tantric awe into my feet—but without taking off my shoes, thank you.”

I lean over to unlink the shoelaces that Rapunzel tied together earlier. Then I drop down to the floor and do ten push-ups, grunting like an army recruit. With my arms as props, I lift my upper body to her derrière-level and feign a quick strike at my preferred target, barking fake karate yells. But this is just psychodrama, a strategy to heighten the foreplay and impress Rapunzel with my erotically attractive unpredictability. In fact, I’m determined not to blaze in on a fast, direct course and bang my lips ineffectually against the unyielding black leather guarding her toes. Instead, I plan to spiral in from the side of the left boot and descend on that sensitive borderland where the smooth hood of the boot meets the latticework where the laces begin.

Like a cobra I dart and feint with my head, approaching the target with a teasing caginess. Rapunzel seems patient, standing calmly with her legs apart about shoulder width, her eyes gazing down to catch my show. To add to the drama, I hiss almost subliminally.

My final descent is in slow motion. With reverent tenderness, I rest my lips gently against the targeted area and begin to chant a mantra evoked specially for the occasion: SMOOOOOOCH. Now and then my tongue slips out to seal the prayer, tasting the leather that separates me from Rapunzel’s sacred skin.

“I’m pleased,” she says blithely when I’m done. “That was one of the most lion-hearted boot kisses I’ve ever been worshiped with. I can see you’re willing to take blasphemous liberties with your tantra. You don’t do it by rote. Shows your great promise.”

“Thank you thank you thank you.”

“Now what’s that hype you spouted about writing a whole album’s worth of songs for me? Are you really prepared to follow through on that offer, or was that just your sex making promises the rest of you can’t keep?”

“It’ll be like a rock opera,” I riff without hesitation, “based on a story of a macho feminist rock singer who before a show at a big nightclub sneaks into the women’s bathroom because he’s heard there’s a lot of horny graffiti written about him in one of the stalls. Only while he’s in there he has a fortuitous encounter with a mysterious woman with a fairy tale name who he quickly realizes is smarter than he is and who also isn’t totally gaga about his fame and charisma like all the other girls, which turns him on so much that he cooks up a plan to get to know her better. And the plan is that he offers to write a whole cycle of songs about her based on the story of her life, which he has no intention of actually doing because it’s just his sex making promises the rest of him can’t keep. She falls for it. She agrees to let him interview her and follow her around and plagiarize her life. To his own amazement, the rockstar gradually realizes she is the most fascinating and powerful woman—no, the most fascinating and powerful
person—
that he’s ever met. He becomes so infatuated with the epic sweep of her fate that he sets to work composing a great song cycle about her after all.”

“Doesn’t exactly fit into the World Entertainment War esthetic though, does it?” Rapunzel replies in a compassionately skeptical tone. “I love what you and your band do, but you’re not especially renowned for your poignant storytelling, are you? I admit that you’ve got the formula down for funky rock anthems and comic shticks. You do the pagan chant thingee pretty well, and the anarchist politics. I truly enjoy your whatchamacallit, your bombastic ritual therapy. But I’ve got to say that all that hypermasculine flash leaves me a little hungry in the emotion department. Aside from the shock and laughter and rebellious dissidence, you don’t seem to know squat about how to arouse the whole rest of the spectrum. You know what I mean? I’m talking about
creature
states. Sadness, restlessness, astonishment, the longing to belong, gratitude, mourning—you know,
real life
. You’re always so goddamned mental. So relentlessly masculine.”

“I can explain—”

“Now on the other hand, I
have
seen signs of a budding tenderness in those stories you write for the local paper. Most of the time they’ve been as relentlessly arch and clever as your rockstar shtick. But lately there’s been just a hint of a softening. It’s like you’re tiptoeing up to getting ready to invoke your readers’ soft deep achy feelings. Now and then you condescend to telling an intimate tale about the way the love and pain get all mixed together out here among us common folk.

“You keep going in that direction, and
then
I might let you write a song cycle about me. But not now. Not yet.”

I feel deflated. Her critique is truly insightful—a pithy articulation of thoughts that have only recently appeared on the frontiers of my self-awareness. But I can’t believe she’s suddenly abandoned the bubbly spirit of our theatrical improvisation and regressed into serious conversation. She’s broken the rules of our fun game.

Before I can summon a rejoinder, she slips into one of the stalls and closes the door. She starts singing one of my songs, “Apathy and Ignorance.”

As she croons, she’s rustling around inside the stall. I see she’s taken off her windbreaker and draped it over the top of the stall. Finally she finishes the song and yells out, “Take off your shirt and throw it over to me.”

I obey. A moment later a shirt flies out. I guess she was wearing it under the windbreaker. “Let’s trade,” she says.

I don my new costume, a short-sleeved baseball jersey. It’s dark plum with black pinstripes. The number thirteen is on the back. A big, buttoned pocket graces each side. On the front of the right pocket are the words “Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail,” along with a picture of a rather queenly gold and red vulture, who has a woman’s face and crown on a body which is thoroughly buzzardly except for two exuberant breasts. This is a more majestic version of the creature in Rapunzel’s comic strip.

I soak in the new scent that now clings to me.
Silken saltiness
are the words that come to mind to describe it. Ancient freshness. I flash on an immaculate spider web after a summer rain, and the leathery sweetness of the Dead Sea Scrolls, whose fragments I once sniffed in a museum. Weirdly, I’m also reminded of a vivid smell from childhood: my mother’s sweetly musty old khaki cloth bag full of marbles from her own childhood. She kept it in her closet, and when she wasn’t home I would sneak it out to examine the beautiful antique marbles. Strange that this specific old aroma would emanate now from the shirt of a stranger. It’s indescribably unique. There are no words for it besides the pictures and feelings they stir: chilly autumn Saturdays playing alone in the basement of the family home in Michigan while football games drone on the TV.

All these fragrances together evoke in me a delirious happiness, a kind of dreamy unselfconscious joy from my childhood. It’s very different from the alert, calculating excitement that Rapunzel’s presence has provoked in me up till now, though also oddly synergistic. Adding to the celebration is my instinctive sense that all of her delicious smells are utterly natural. Nothing artificial in the mix, thank Goddess. No pheromone-destroying perfumes or deodorants.