Tom Robbins - Jitterbug Perfume

“Is not Pan a male god?” asked Alobar.

“True, he is, but he is associated with female values. To diminish the worth of women, men had to diminish the worth of the moon. They had to drive a wedge between human beings and the trees and the beasts and the waters, because trees and beasts and waters are as loyal to the moon as to the sun. They had to drive a wedge between thought and feeling, between the lamplight by which they count the day's earnings and the dark to which our Pan is ever connected. At first they used Apollo as the wedge, and the abstract logic of Apollo made a mighty wedge, indeed, but Apollo the artist maintained a love for women, not the open, unrestrained lust that Pan has, but a controlled longing that undermined the patriarchal ambition. When Christ came along, Christ, who slept with no female, neither two-legged nor four, Christ, who played no musical instrument, recited no poetry, and never kicked up his heels by moonlight, this Christ was the perfect wedge. Christianity is merely a system for turning priestesses into handmaidens, queens into concubines, and goddesses into muses.”

“And who can guess into what it will turn us nymphs?”

Alobar felt a surge of beet-red temper. Violently, he shook his head. “The world is changing,” he said, “but there will always be a place in it for you. And for Pan.”

“Perhaps. Certainly, we wish the moderns no harm, though Pan plays roughly with them at times. And thou? Will thou escape the fate thy feareth?”

“You misunderstand me. I do not fear death. I resent it. Everything must die, apparently, and I am no exception. But I want to be consulted. You know what I mean? Death is impatient and thoughtless. It barges into your room when you are right in the middle of something, and it doesn't bother to wipe its boots. I have a new passion, my darlings, a passion for being myself, and for being more than previously has been manifested for a single lifetime. I am determined to die at my own convenience. Therefore, I journey to the east, where, I have been told, there are men who have taught death some manners.”

“We suspect thou art as foolish as brave, Alobar. In fact, bravery may be naught but foolishness. Fear, like love, is a call into the wild — into the deep, shadowy grotto. Fear is a finer thing than resentment. Resentment, an affliction of the mind, will leave thee complaining in Christ's well-lighted halls, but fear, a wisdom of the body, will lead thee back to Pan.”

While Alobar was thinking that over, Pan awoke, stretched, and scampered into the thistles. When with the sun's setting he did not return, Alobar gave the nymphs a last squeeze and began his long, laborious descent, during which he several times heard thunderous laughter ring round about him and once thought he saw a moonbeam strike, high up in the crags, a fleeting horn.

Alone, with not so much as a sperm left to accompany him, Alobar again directed his steps toward the east. His was the gait of expectation, a pace set more by intuition than by reason, a clip fueled more by vague hints of wonderment than by steady assessments of purpose.

He was to continue in that fashion for an inappropriately long stretch of literary time, passing through more landscapes than there are keys on a typewriter, having more adventures than there are nibs for pens. Not once during or following a perilous escapade did it occur to him that the unpredictability of the moment of one's death might provide life with its necessary tension. But ever mindful of the kin of Pan, whose memory no encounter, however dramatic, could obscure, he allowed himself to resent death less and fear it more. And as he passed through one exotic environment after another, learning languages, wearing out boots, he sang his little song:

"I love the ground-o, ground-o

A ball beneath my feet

The world is round-o, round-o

Just like a frigging beet."

No, he would not be remembered as bard — nor, for that matter, as warrior or king. Life is fair, however, and in the fragrance industry, his name would one day become an accepted part of the nomenclature. According to Priscilla, the genius waitress, an alobar is a unit of measurement that describes the rate at which Old Spice after-shave lotion is absorbed by the lace on crotchless underpants, although at other times she has defined it as the time it takes Chanel No. 5 to evaporate from the wing tips of a wild duck flying backward.

SEATTLE

IT SEEMED LIKE THE WHOLE TOWN WAS at odds over the solar eclipse. A lot of people were of the opinion that since in Seattle one seldom saw the sun anyhow, there was nothing very special about not seeing it again. Monday morning would be only a shade darker than usual, they reasoned. The difference, according to others, perhaps the majority, was that Monday was forecast to be clear. With the absence of the cloud cover that normally caused the sky over Seattle to resemble cottage cheese that had been dragged nine miles behind a cement truck, the city, for the first time in memory, would have an unobstructed view of one of nature's most mystical spectacles.

“Did you walk up to Volunteer Park to watch the eclipse?” was the first thing Ricki said to Priscilla when she came by her apartment Monday noon.

“Nope. Didn't make it outdoors,” said Priscilla, yawning.

“You watched it on TV then?”

“No, I didn't.”

“You didn't see it at all ?”

“I listened to it,” said Priscilla. “I listened to it on the radio. It sounded like bacon frying.”

“Shit, woman. Sometimes I don't believe you're for real.” Ricki looked about the room for a place to sit. The couch and the chair, the most logical contenders, were piled high with dirty clothes, clean clothes, clothes in transition, books, unopened mail, and laboratory equipment. There were also a couple of beets. Ricki elected to stand. “You'd better shift into your hurry-up offense,” she said. “The meeting starts in thirty minutes.”

“I can shower on first down, make up on second, and dress on third. If I haven't put it over by then, I can always kick a field goal.”

“Unless you fumble.”

Priscilla slammed the bathroom door. Ricki had to steady a beaker of liquid to prevent a major spill.

The football repartee was the result of Ricki having talked Priscilla into spending the previous afternoon at the Kingdome, an outing that revealed to Priscilla what Ricki really liked about the Seahawks. It was the Seagals. “Fashions come and go, come and go,” said Ricki, “but the length of the cheerleader skirt remains constant, and it is upon that abbreviated standard that I base my currency of joy.”

Today (they each had Sundays and Mondays off), Ricki was taking Priscilla to a meeting of the Daughters of the Daily Special, an organization of waitresses with university degrees. At least in the beginning all the members had had university degrees. The group had some time ago lowered its standards to accept waitresses with only two years of college. That was when Ricki was admitted, back when it was still called Sisters of the Daily Special. “Sisters” had come to sound too political. It suggested a feminine solidarity that the waitresses, in their honesty, considered not just inaccurate but inappropriate. “We're out to grab us some gusto, not cut anybody's nuts off,” was the way Ricki put it.

In Seattle, as in most other large cities, there were a fair number of women who had studied art, literature, philosophy, history, etc., only to find that their education and a dollar would buy them a glass of Perrier. True, they hadn't entered their respective fields with the idea of getting rich, but neither had they expected that a summa cum laude would take them about as far from campus as the nearest dry water hole. Unable to support themselves in the work of their choice, they turned to waitressing, for there they could earn the most money for the least investment. If it wasn't possible for them to do something meaningful and fulfilling, at least they could be well compensated for a minimum of moral compromise and an even barer minimum of vocational commitment.