Riders of the Purple Wage Read online

  After breakfast, Judy said, “The demonstration is this afternoon. This morning I’ll start proceedings to get you on welfare.”

  She had to explain this. He was amazed. “You mean I get paid for not working?”

  Judy, hearing this, laughed and said. “Rip, you’re a natural-born hippie.”

  But his visions of paradise vanished when Judy found that he had no social security card, no ID of any kind.

  “I don’t know,” Judy said. “Those clothes, the 1772 coins, your ignorance…you couldn’t really be Rip van Winkle, could you?”

  “Would you believe me if I said I was?”

  “Not unless I was on something. Never mind. I’ll get you a card, and you can apply.

  Meanwhile, how about taking a shower with me? I sold your halfpence this morning and bought some pot with part of the bread, but I used to rest of it to pay a plumber to fix up the toilet and shower.”

  Rip was agreeable since it seemed to him that there was more involved than just washing dirt off. He was right. This age was heaven, even if it was flawed. But then he was no perfectionist.

  That afternoon he boarded a rusty old bus with about fifty others, it broke down a mile from where the parade started, and they walked the rest of the way. Rip carried a placard: DICK US NO DICKS. Judy carried: NO MORE BLOODSHED IN VIETNAM. He didn’t know what the signs meant and didn’t want to be ridiculed if he showed his ignorance. But it was all exciting. More had happened to him in one day than in all his life in his sleepy little village.

  While he was marching along, the band playing, and he was shouting the slogans he heard the others cry out and giving the V sign, which he supposed meant, “Up yours.” a beautiful redhead with huge conical tits grabbed his crotch.

  “How’re they, Pops? They say you’re tops. You got a dong like King Kong; more jism than bishops have chrism.”

  Rip grinned. He felt as happy as a favorite nephew whose rich uncle has just died, as ecstatic as a stutterer who’s just had a good vowel movement. So he usually didn’t know what people were talking about or what was going on most of the time? Most of the people he’d met didn’t know either, since they were stoned most of the time. And so the food and liquor tasted like someone had farted in them? He could acquire a taste for them.

  Suddenly, there was a lot of yelling and screaming, whistles blowing, and he was running for no reason except that everybody else was, and he was laughing like a woodpecker that’d hammered its brains out drilling for bugs in a streetlamp post. Maybe he might get his head busted or get thrown into gaol, but it was worth it. Such fun!

  He threw his placard down just before summer fell away like a politician’s virtue at the first bribe offered. The light purple haze swirled. Snow he couldn’t feel sifted through him. Nights and days blinked like a whore batting her eyes at him. The seasons whirled around like a brindled dog chasing its tail.

  “Oh, no! Not again!”

  As suddenly as it had started, the gallop of time ceased. He was on the same spot and in the blaze of summer. People elbowed and jostled and groped him, but they were not those he’d left in the 70’s. However, something unusual was going on. A parade of some sort. Here came a band, followed by a float bearing a huge animal figure, a funny-looking elephant, and then a group of fat elderly men dressed like Algerian pirates. Fezes, baggy pants, fake scimitars. Their leader carried a sign:

  SHRINERS FOR LEX N. ORDO

  AGAINST ANTI-LIFE MURDERERS

  At the rear was a man dressed like the Sultan of Turkey. His sign said:

  ONE FAMILY, ONE HEAD, ONE VOTE

  Behind him came marching women in white semi-military uniforms and veils. Many carried infants in their arms or jerked along toddlers. Their leader’s sign said:

  CHURCH, CHOW, CHILDREN

  A very pregnant young woman, wearing gloves despite the heat, bumped against Rip. She snarled at him; he backed away. He glimpsed the butt of a handgun in her open handbag.

  Aimlessly, he made his way through the spectators thronged along the street. It seemed to him that he’d never seen so many knocked-up women in one place. All were gloved. Was there a new custom that pregnant females had to cover their hands when in public?

  He approached a very young woman, big like so many nowadays, a head taller than he. Her size wasn’t her only elephantine feature.

  Her belly looked like she’d been carrying the baby for eighteen months.

  He mumbled, “I been kind of out of things for some time. What year is this?”

  She stared at him, then laughed.

  “You a wino? Or you been in the slammer? It’s 1987, shithead. It’s also the year of the greatest infamy in history! The blackest, the lowest, the most degrading, the Naziest! That self-righteous puritanical motherfucking male-pig-chauvinist tight-assed fascist Ordo!”

  “What? Who?” Rip said, trying to back away but stopped by the crowd.

  “You must of been in solitary confinement! Or are you an acidhead? The President, you twit-brained prickface! That’s who! He finally got the anti-abortion amendment passed! So…look at me! You can’t even find a backroom butcher nowadays! They’re scared they’ll be sent up for life, and…”

  “Here he comes!” someone shouted, and the cheering and clapping drowned out whatever else she was saying. The people were jumping up and down like barefooted sinners in hell and weeping tears bigger than horse apples. Nearby, a man, mouth frothing, eyes rolling, was down on the pavement trying to bite chunks out of the curbing. If no one else loved him, his dentist did.

  First came six cars crowded with grim-faced men carrying rifles. Then a bunch of motorcycle cops. Then some armed toughs running ahead of a topless car. In its front seat were a driver and two men with set faces but nervous eyes and, in the back, a good-looking but aged woman and a man standing up and waving and grinning like an opium-smoker who’d just had a successful session in a comfort station.

  The roar of the crowd pressed in on Rip like a bill-collector who’s finally cornered his victim. It wasn’t so loud, though, that it covered the almost simultaneous explosions of fifty—a hundred?—handguns. The big woman’s pistol went off an inch from Rip’s ear, causing him to crap in his pants. A second later, the gun flew high over him and landed in the street.

  Rip whirled. Though deafened, he could read the woman’s lips.

  “There! Let the shitheads try to figure out who shot the asshole!”

  Was it a conspiracy? Could a hundred women, or men, for that matter, keep a plot like that to themselves? Hell, no. A hundred pregnant women had just happened to come here with the same idea. Who knew how many more were further down the street, waiting for the chance they’d never get?

  Now the guns were flying everywhere, like steel semen from a jacked-off robot. Their owners were getting rid of them and shucking their gloves, too. Their target was lying in the street, pumping blood from at least fifty holes. If he’d been an oil field, America could have told OPEC to fuck off.

  Once more, Rip was running. The dead man’s guards were firing everywhere, and innocent bystanders, some not so innocent, were dropping like fleas from a poisoned dog. Rip finally got clear of the massacre, though he was twice trampled, kicked in the balls once, and clawed so many times he lost most of his clothes and much of his skin. He was reminded of the one time he’d tallywhacked Brom Dutcher’s wife. But now he wasn’t getting any pleasure whatsoever.

  He ran into a tavern. Panting, he stood by the window and watched the noisy turmoil outside. Then, hearing a small thunderous noise, he turned. Cold ran over him. The noise had been too much like that of the game of ninepins the little old men had played while he drank their Hollands gin, so excellent in taste but so surprising in its effects. He saw some bowling alleys, something new to him. But he paid them no attention. Facing him were two of the little old men. One was the commander, the stout old gentleman in the laced doublet, high-crowned hat, red stockings, and high-heeled shoes.

  He spoke in a foreign accen
t. “It took us some time to track you through time, Rip. Too much of the elixir does more than put you into suspended animation. Anyway, let’s go.”

  “No, no!” Rip said loudly, hoping the patrons would come to his rescue. “Please! This age isn’t paradise, but…”

  This wasn’t old New York where everybody’s business was yours. No one wanted to get involved now. While the patrons turned away or just watched, the other little man jabbed something into Rip’s arm. Unconsciousness fell on him like a mugger.

  Just as in the book he’d read, he awoke in A.D. 1792, in the same place where he’d fallen asleep. He had a backache ten times worse than all his hangovers put together. It wasn’t from all the fucking he’d done. You couldn’t lie on your back without moving for twenty years and not get a backache. Fortunately, the elixir had somehow kept him from freezing to death and had prevented bedsores.

  Trudging down to the village, weeping for his lost if half-assed Eden, he thought about the little men. Unlike Washington Irving, Rip didn’t think they were the spirits of Henry Hudson and his crew. They were men from outer space, maybe from one of those UFOs that couple had talked about. Or time travelers from the far future.

  When Rip got to the village, he knew how to act. Hadn’t the scenario been written for him, wouldn’t it be, rather, by that hack Irving forty-seven years from now? But life wasn’t too bad, as it turned out. He was an old man now, fifty-five, and nobody expected him to work for a living. Come to think of it, none but his now departed wife had ever expected it of him. His daughter’s husband, a genial fellow, didn’t mind supporting him, especially since Rip was now a living legend.

  Rip sat often in front of Doolittle’s Union Hotel, which had once been van Vedder’s Tavern, and he told the story as Irving had, and he got so many free drinks he almost couldn’t handle them.

  Sometimes, late in the afternoon, loaded with more booze than a rumrunner’s ship, he’d close his eyes and doze or seem to doze. The loafers and the tourists around him would see his face clench in fright. They figured he was having a nightmare, and they were right. He was thinking about the bad things in the 20th century, and those would give even the natives of that time nightmares.

  Other times, he’d smile, his hips would rotate, and his beard would rise where it covered his fly. Chuckling, snorting, nudging each other’s ribs with their elbows, they’d figure that old horny Rip was having a wet dream. They were right, but they didn’t know how purple it was.

  Osiris on Crutches

  I

  Set, a god of the ancient land of Egypt, was the first critic. Once be had been a creator, but the people ceased to believe in his creativity. He then suffered a divinity block, which is similar to a writer’s block.

  This is a sad fate for a deity. Odin and Thor, once cosmic creators, became devils—that is, critics—in the new religion which killed off their old religion. Satan, or Lucifer, was an archangel, in the Book of Job, but he became the chief of demons, the head-honcho critic, in the New Testament. The Great Goddess of the very ancient Mediterranean regions, named Cybele, Anana, Demeter, depending on where she lived, became a demon, Lilith, for instance, or, in one case, the Mother of God (and who criticizes more than a mother?). But she had to do that via the back door, and most people that pray to her don’t know that she was not always called Mary. Of course, there are scholars who deny this, just as there are scholars who deny the existence of the Creator.

  Those were the days. Gods walked the earth then. They weren’t invisible or absent as they are nowadays. A man or a woman could speak directly to them. They might get only a divine fart in their faces, but if the god felt like talking, the human had a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

  Nowadays, you can only get into contact with a god by prayer. This is like sending a telegram which the messenger boy may or may not deliver. And there is seldom a reply by wire, letter, or phone.

  In the dawn of mankind, the big gods in Egypt were Osiris, Isis, Nephthys, and Set. They were brothers and sisters, and Osiris was married to Isis and Set was married to Nephthys. Everybody then thought that incest was natural, especially if it took place among the gods.

  In any event, no human was dumb enough to protest against the incest. If the gods missed you with their lightning or plagues, the priests got you with their sacrificial knives.

  People had no trouble at all seeing the gods, though they might have to be quick about it. The peasants standing in mud mixed with ox manure and the pharaohs standing on their palace porches could see the four great gods, along with Osiris’ vizier, Thoth, and Anubis, as they whizzed by. These traveled like the wind or the Roadrunner zooming through the Coyote’s traps. Their figures were blurred with speed, dust was their trail, the screaming of split air their only sound.

  From dawn to dusk they raced along, blessing the land and all on and in it.

  However, the gods noticed a peculiar thing when they roared by a field just north of Abydos. A man always sat in the field, and his back was always turned to them. Sometimes they would speed around to look at his face. But when they did, they still found themselves looking at his back. And if one god went north and one south and one east and one west, four boxing the man in, all four could still only see his back.

  “There is One greater than even us,” they told each other. “Do you suppose that She, or He, as the case might be, put him there? Or perhaps that is even Him or Her?”

  “You mean ‘He or She,’” Set said. Even then he was potentially a critic.

  After a while they quit staying up nights wondering who the man was and why they couldn’t see his face and who put him there. But he was never entirely out of their minds at any time.

  There is nothing that bugs an omniscient like not knowing something.

  II

  Set stopped creating and became a nasty, nay-saying critic because the people stopped believing in him. Gods have vast powers and often use them with no consideration for the feelings or wishes of humans. But every god has a weakness against which he or she or it is helpless. If the humans decide he is an evil god, or a weak god, or a dying god, then he becomes evil or weak or dead. Too bad, Odin! Rotten luck, Zeus! Tough shit, Quetzalcoatl! Trail’s end, Gitche Manitou!

  But Set was a fighter. He was also treacherous, though he can’t be blamed for that since humans had decided that he was no good. He planned some unexpected events for Osiris at the big festival in Memphis honoring Osiris’ return from a triumphant world tour, SRO. He planned to shortsheet his elder brother, Osiris, in a big way. From our viewpoint, our six-thousand-year perspective. Set may have had good reason. His sister-wife, Nephthys, was unable to conceive by him and, worse, she lusted after Osiris. Osiris resisted her, though not without getting red in the face and elsewhere.

  This was not easy, since Osiris’ flesh was green. Which has led some moderns to speculate that he may have come in a flying saucer from Mars. But his flesh was green because that’s the color of living plants, and he was the god of agriculture. Among other things.

  Nephthys overcame his moral scruples by getting him drunk. (This was the same method used by Lot’s daughters many thousands of years later.) The result of this illicit rolling in the reeds was Anubis. Anubis, like a modern immortal, was a “funny-looking kid,” and for much the same reason. He had the head of a jackal. This was because jackals ate the dead, and Anubis was the conductor, the ticket-puncher, for the souls who rode into the afterlife.

  Bighearted Isis found the baby Anubis in the bulrushes, and she raised him as her own, though she knew very well who the parents were.

  Osiris strode into Memphis. He was happy because he had just finished touring the world and teaching non-Egyptians all about peace and nonviolence. The world has never been in such good shape as then and, alas, never will be again. Set smiled widely and spread his arms to embrace Osiris. Osiris should have been wary. Set, as a babe, had torn himself prematurely and violently from his mother’s womb, tearing her also. He was rough and wild,
white-skinned and red-haired. He was a wild ass of a man.

  Isis sat on her throne. She was radiant with happiness. Osiris had been gone for a long time, and she missed him. During his absence, Set had been sidling up to her and asking her if she wanted to get revenge on her husband for his adulterous fling with Nephthys. Isis had told him to beat it. But, truth to tell, she was wondering how long she could have held out. Gods and goddesses are hornier than mere humans, and you know how horny they are.

  Isis, however, had to wait. Set gave a banquet that would have turned Cecil B. DeMille green with envy. When everyone ached from stuffing himself, and belches were exploding like rockets over Fort Henry, Set clapped his hands. Four large, but minor, gods staggered in. Among them they bore a marvelously worked coffer. They set it down, and Osiris said, “What is that exquisite objet d’art, brother?”

  “It’s a gift for whomever can fit himself into it exactly,” Set said. Anybody else would have said “whoever,” but Set was for more concerned with form than content.

  To start things off, Set tried to get into the coffer. He was too tall, as he knew he’d be. His seventy-two accomplices in the conspiracy—Set was wicked but he was no piker—were too short. Isis didn’t even try. Then Osiris, swaying a little from the gallons of wine he’d drunk, said, “If the coffer fits, wear it.” Everybody laughed, and he climbed into the coffer and stretched out. The top of his head just touched the head of the coffer, and the soles of his feet just touched its foot.

  Osiris smiled, though not for long. The conspirators slammed the lid down on his face and nailed it down. Set laughed; Isis screamed. The people ran away in panic. Paying no attention to the drumming on the lid from within the coffer, the accomplices rushed the coffer down to the Nile. There they threw it in, and the current carried it seaward.