The Televisionary Oracle (67 page)

“You’d be surprised what I can do with the help of our sixty-six-million-year-old technology. A portable sample of which is right over there. We call it the Televisionary Oracle.”

Rapunzel is pointing towards the mud and stone television.

“So with the help of your magic box you sneaked into my psyche
and found out I sometimes stoke my orgy fantasies with a handful of women who aren’t supermodels?”

“Sort of, yes. Which is why I can say with confidence that you definitely don’t trust your lust enough. Because if you did, if you exorcised the shame you’ve allowed to infect your orgy fantasies, you’d really jack up your ability to resurrect the splendorous beauty of poisoned masculinity. You’d shoot out to the frontier of an even more sublime taboo.”

“What taboo could there possibly be beyond that? Beyond the desire to be a lone Dionysus with a gang of horny women?”

“The desire to be a lone Dionysus with a gang of horny women of all shapes and sizes and ages. A lone Dionysus who does not choose only the prettiest, youngest, most supple horny women to run away with into the woods. Who longs for and is available to
all
women.”

Uh-oh. Red alert. So gradually I haven’t realized it, most of the shamanatrixes in the room have removed major parts of their elaborate costumes. Were they playing strip poker with those Tarot cards? Vistas of flesh are exposed, along with a wealth of often comical lingerie. These are not stylish items from a Victoria’s Secret catalogue, but bikinis made of brightly colored band-aids and yarn, camisoles with attached moss and Christmas tree icicles, and lacy nursing bras with rubber shark puppet mouths where the flap opens.

Furthermore, many of the women are now peering at me with some mix of sweet, sultry, and sympathetic expressions.

I will myself to deepen my breathing as I scramble to assess my feelings. My rational mind knows that if this were any other situation, I’d rate two of the women here as full-on sexy to me and maybe six mildly attractive, while most of the rest I’d feel neutral about except for two that arouse my repulsion. But I’m so far gone from my normal state that my old evaluation system does not hold. To my amazement, I feel a preposterous lust for every single woman here.

Or have I merely had my esthetic exploded by the prodigious titillation and by Rapunzel’s quasi-hypnotic suggestions? Have all my habitual responses been rendered irrelevant?

“This potential of yours, to be an all-purpose Dionysian muse, is one of the qualities that makes you so deserving of your own personalized menarche,” Rapunzel explains soothingly. “It’s also a valuable
asset for storming the precincts of the Drivetime.”

“To long for and be available to
all
women?” I stammer.

“You want to live in the Drivetime full-time? Where nothing needs to be true and everything is sacred and Goddess is a tenderly lascivious prankster at your service? Then tap into your hidden talent for being as lusty towards everyone and everything as you are towards me. Meditate on how to rev up your testosterone until it’s in love with great grandmas listening to talk radio in nursing homes and chubby Guatemalan peasant women pounding laundry down by the river.”

“But if I’m equally carnal for everything,” I protest weakly, “if there’s no difference between my desire for you and my desire for the grandma in the nursing home, doesn’t that make me a ball of mush?”

“Exact opposite of that. You can never be a ball of mush if you’re stoked with gargantuan levels of passion.”

Rapunzel has undone the rest of the buttons on her baseball jersey. All the other women in the room have abandoned their chairs and are doing yoga asanas or tai-chi moves. My eyes are in crisis mode, frantically reaching out to engorge the epiphanies of breasts and butts jiggling as bodies stretch. I flash on the myth of Semele, who was burned to ash upon beholding Zeus in his dangerous glory. Except that the roles are reversed here. I’m Semele.

The most limber of the teasers, a pretty young Asian woman wearing only loose white silk shorts, is doing an absurdly salacious yoga pose that might go well on a “Girls of
Penthouse
Workout Video.” Balanced on her shoulders and neck, she thrusts one leg out sideways and one out straight, both parallel to the floor. She rotates slowly, like a graceful breakdancer.

In my altered state of exploded lust, though, she evokes no more shivering blithers than any of the other women in the room. I’m equally turned on by the woman with a thick scar on her cheek and a big crooked witch nose, and the forty-something matron with cellulite and sagging breasts that have obviously nursed several children. I seem to be in bloom with the state of omni-horniness that Rapunzel said was helpful for living full-time in the Drivetime.

Rapunzel motions for me to get out of my chair and come hither. I obey. She grasps me around the waist and pulls me down to sit on her lap. Peering down, I have a perfect view of her breasts surging in
her black lace bra.

“So what do you say,” she murmurs as her bouquet of fruity, musky aromas spills over me, “that we take an inventory of how well you’re doing on the project of achieving gargantuan passion?”

I’m hungry for the real goo
, I think to myself,
for the sauce and the splash and the balm. I seek the true lust unguent that binds and burns, that cures and incites
.

“Tell me now. Be frank. How, in your heart of hearts, do you feel about
hag marks
on your luscious females? Look around here at the holy host of menstrual geniuses for reference. Do you honestly, no bullshit, have a divinely inspired affinity for thick black hairs sprouting from nipples and navels and maybe even chins? How about pimples on the butt? Stretch marks on pendulous breasts and big noble witchy noses and week-old stubble on shaved legs? Did you really, truly mean what you wrote in your personal ad at the Catalyst, ‘All my patriarchal imprints incinerated’?”

Keep me close always to your real maw, rolling in the rose dark behind your lids and lips, under the thigh and over the fear and into the sweat and the fur, between the breasts and spirit straight to the taste of your shivering moist soul
.

“What I’m driving at, my dear, is this: Do you truly and without any reservations pledge to place yourself under the influence of the mysterious chemicals of
real
women? Or will you continue to harbor, under cover of your feminist rhetoric, hypocritical urges to love only a narrow simulation of the Goddess’ panoramic beauty? I think it’s time you took a stand one way or the other. Not just with your fine words. But with your actual body. Know what I mean?”

I want to be awake to the actual low rumbling of your rant and shadow, stretching to hear the strong old medicines of your tongue, pulsing limbless in waves of your lunatic hair—staring, face loose, into your molten pores and through to the generous dreams of your glands
.

“In other words, beautiful, what kind of man do you want to be when you grow up?”

The thrill of the menstrual dark will be my secret salvation; the uterine quiver will be the best hysteria of my obsession
.

“I vow to love the hag marks as much as the beauty marks,” I speak aloud to the gathering, feeling as if I’m channeling the spirit of an Irish bard, who a psychic once told me I was in a previous incarnation.

“I will swoon for the bumps and the dangles and the wobbly foibles just as much as I will for the smooth, sleek swivels and the taut, trim treasures. Therefore I now and forevermore renounce my worship of the slutty madonna fetishes passed into law by every shit-hoarding religion, and the man-made surrogates called bitches on pedestals, and all the leached, face-lifted, fanny-tucked, depillatoried, silicone-enhanced Olympian cyborgs who pride themselves on having the freshest feminine smell in the history of capitalism. I renounce them all. Forever and ever, amen. Awomen.”

Wow. Where did that come from?

Rapunzel smothers me in a big hug and then maneuvers me into a position where she can kiss me on the belly. “May you find the treasure in the trash, the gold in the lead, and the manna in the junk food!” she exclaims. The room explodes in a chorus of ululating Amazon yelps.

“May you use your nightmares to become rich and famous,” Jumbler adds amidst the cacophony, her arms stretched upwards in a V like a baseball player who has just smacked a game-winning home run.

“Because you can have anything you want,” an older woman pitches in, “if you’ll only ask for it in an unselfish tone of voice.”

As the hubbub rages on, with others calling out odd slogans, all but Rapunzel work to push the tables to the periphery of the room and form a circle of chairs around me. Eventually, everyone sits down. I am now astride Rapunzel’s lap, surrounded by mostly naked shamanatrixes whose gazes are directed at me.

Jumbler, who is still fully clothed, fetches a curious object from the altar against the back wall. It’s a crown made out of willow branches, woven grass, lilies, copper and silver crayons, and a Tarot card which shows the goddess Athena in a “Menstrual Temple” baseball uniform. Jumbler ceremoniously places the contraption on my head.

“Congratulations, initiate,” she says, “and welcome to the Menstrual Temple of the Funky Grail! I am very pleased to inform you that you have won a free value-pack of prizes worth three million years of vacation time in the Drivetime, plus the psychoanalysis of your diamond wand, a fabulously useful new organ of perception where your pineal gland now sits, and a reserved monthly space in the menstrual hut of your choice!

“And that’s not all. As an added special bonus, you have been selected to be a contestant in the Fuck Your Friends Dating Game. One of three lucky shamanatrixes is going to win the privilege of escorting you through the rest of your menarche. Are you ready to play?”

“Can I take my curlers out?” I say with exultant meekness. “Rapunzel said I only had to keep them in until it was time for my date.”

“Of course,” Jumbler smiles, and begins removing the tampons from my hair. “By the way, Osiris, I want you to know that the Fuck Your Friends Dating Game is reserved exclusively for Love Geniuses who have demonstrated a potential for juggling rugged individualism and radical intimacy. Think you can handle that?”

Radical intimacy? Don’t know what that is, but with Rapunzel as muse I’d be highly motivated to master it.

“I have always wanted to be a Love Genius,” I say.

The Asian woman of the sexy yoga pose fame produces a brush, and she and Jumbler tease my hair into a fright wig. Meanwhile, Rapunzel leads the other women in a spritely version of the World Entertainment War song, “Dance Your Monster.” Artemisia plays guitar.

“Do you realize,” Jumbler notes after they finish, “that the last time an actual male was called on to be in the Fuck Your Friends Dating Game, the ancient Sumerian city of Ur had not yet been built?”

“Considering how big an occasion this is, then,” I say, “I think I should clean up that egg you anointed my belly with. I’m sure my date would appreciate it.”

“Certainly,” Jumbler says boisterously. “Let me get you a sanitary napkin.” She hands me two maxipads from out of her red pouch. They’re delicately decorated around the peripheries with lozenges, double-headed axes, snakes, and butterflies.

As I pull back the waistband of my shorts to begin the mop-up, I’m taken aback. There is a trickle of blood emerging from the exact spot where Rapunzel daubed the “Dragon’s Blood” back in the kitchen. It’s blending with the slime of the half-dried egg white. This must be related to the mild cramps I’ve been feeling off and on.

I wipe the red streak away with one of the maxipads and watch the area for a few moments. The dribble returns, but very slowly. I guess I’m in no immediate danger of bleeding to death. But how did it happen?

Jumbler and Rapunzel are seeing the ooze that I am.

“Are you having any cramps?” Rapunzel asks eagerly.

“A little,” I report.

“Rowdy ruby glissando!” Rapunzel announces loudly, and again a cheer goes up from the assembly. “Just in time for the Dating Game!”

“Without further ado,” Jumbler proclaims when the hubbub dies down, looking at me with glee, “let’s introduce you now to the three friendly Fuckfriends who’ll vie for your favor. One of them will be
your
date!”

“First up we have a thirty-five-year-old genius with Ph.D.s in both music and physics. A major Pythagoras fan, she just happens to be the one and only quantum physicist on the planet who has mastered the art of lucid dreaming. Her Fuckfriend code name is Wealthy Anarchist. She regularly plays violin in accompaniment with the music of the spheres, and she claims her guardian angel looks a lot like Malcolm X. Here she is!”

A Jewish woman with blonde hair teased out into an explosion that must exceed the afro I’m now sporting, Wealthy Anarchist is wearing nothing else but the largest pair of white cotton underpants I have ever seen. They’re far too big for her actual butt, so they’re always on the verge of slipping off as she wriggles around in her chair. She lifts the waistband up and plays peekaboo behind them briefly. Then she picks up a knife from one of the tables and pokes through the cotton. She rips apart a hole wide enough to fit her face through, and delivers her spiel.

“I’m a disgruntled postal employee looking for a zombie love slave or lonely bank teller to share erotic fantasies about IRS audits and root canals.”

Everyone in the room shakes with laughter, especially Wealthy Anarchist herself. When she recovers her composure, she continues.

“Just kidding. Actually, I’m an angel-wrestlin’, magic carpet-ridin’, sky-kissin’ lover of architects who moonlight as exotic dancers and vegetarians who sneak pork chops. So please don’t confuse me by being simple.”

Again, guffaws whoosh through the room. I’m beginning to like this woman.

“No, really,” she begins again. “In absolute actual fact, I am an inveterate xeroxer of my own butt who’s seeking a like-minded cynical
optimist for clowny adventures like trading clothes and rollerblading out to the nearest bridge for a no-holds-barred spitting-into-the-wind contest. Wouldn’t mind if you were also into pursuing a career in killing the apocalypse, cultivating weird companions, collecting the relics of female saints, and exchanging frequent piggyback rides.”