I Signifying

“So the big guy with the beard whumps J.C. upside the head and says:  hit the street bitch and don’t come home till you bring me some real souls” – that’s what frilled lizard said and of course none of us believed her although he swore up and down she’d been there from jump, sequestered behind a boulder at the Temptation, scuttled all the way from Gethsemane down the Via Dolorosa and had personally weighted the dice at Golgotha.  Out of respect for the amphibian’s dual nature, we kept our skepticism to ourselves – in any case, I had engaged her to tell stories and he was just proving worthy of her hire.

For my part, I’d won the bid to restore the monumental sculpture on the pediment above the railway station by low-balling the competition on the strength of my winged sandals, which eliminated the need for costly scaffolding.

Finding the job daunting, I hired a crew consisting of:  two flying squirrels, Mynra, the wizard with a trowel, and her brother Cyprian – who was relatively an oaf, but they came as a pair – Bubba, a hyperthyroid lemur, and Yves/Yvette, the ambivalent frilled lizard – though getting them vetted by the syndicate had taken no small quantity of vim and vigorish.

In the course of our labors, despite the howling of the traffic, Yvette declaimed balance sheets from the annual reports of a dozen transnational pharmaceutical cartels, the greatest hits of ars erotica and wire service reports of coups and civil unrest.  These last unfailingly upset the pigeons who gathered at teatime to peck our leftover donuts before resuming their intricate swoop formations and daredevil escapes from beneath barreling truck tires.  The frilled lizard’s orations encompassed the Ramayana, passages from La Morte d’Arbuckle and vaquero poetry so pregnant with longing that Bubba wept into the epoxy, destabilizing the mixture.  Like any savvy contractor, I insisted we use it up nonetheless.  Imagine my relief when a section of the cornucopia, restored with this faulty amalgam, exploded in a shower on the passers-by, but was mistaken for fragments of a surveillance satellite whose launch, the frilled lizard reported, had gone mysteriously awry.

All things told, it wasn’t a half bad job – freshening a key symbol of evaporated urban positivism, contributing at last to the reweaving of the threadbare GNP, renewing the massive utopian triad:  Minerva and Hercules lending their respective mental and moral energies to the glory of Commerce – here emblematized as a leaping Mercury.  What more does a city need than these avatars, I thought, buzzing about in my talaria, supervising my able staff, hair-trigger caulking gun at the ready – here burnishing a reconstituted toga hem, there applying the finishing touches to a brave new nose – as frilled lizard regaled us with tales from his prodigious, if spurious, memory – recountings of fabricated history and alarming gossip in couplet form, conflating bio with Bayeux and revising the whole to suit the perceived needs of the narrative moment.

Lest I give the impression of idealizing what, after all, was a pecuniary endeavor – image slavery, Myrna called it, or, referring, no doubt, to me, “working for the Yanquí dullard” – I should not shrink from mentioning our near tragedy.  While on one of his frequent breaks, Cyprian had inadvertently basked against Hercules’ still tacky thigh.  Bondo instante e permanante – alas, we feared we’d never get him free.  A spirited debate ensued as to whether we should jackhammer him loose – almost certainly forfeiting our jobs in the process – in which case, beshelled like a turtle he would never glide again, or alternatively, feed him his favorite donuts until he expired and then cast him in amalgam, revising the blueprints ex post to depict him as a restored feature of the original design.

Yvette who claimed to have spent his first twenty-seven skins in the portentous years before the Big One pretending to be stuffed on a shelf in a Frankfurt lecture hall, articulated our dilemma in terms ethical, physiological, psychological and structural and exhorted us to prognosticate as to the effect each mode of action might have on “the system.”  Not surprisingly, this exegesis raised a host of undreamt-of questions and answered none.  Collectively we weighed the merits, the costs and benefits of our no-win options.  Cyprian’s reluctance to become a permanent part of the cityscape was offset by the short term prospect of unlimited treats and our solicitation of his every ephemeral fancy.  His sister, on the other hand, was all for getting out the pneumatic hammers at once, declaring that he’d always been a Hesperus and deserved to be grounded.

We had reached a true irreconcilable impasse when I had one of my rare flashes of inspiration.  I directed Bubba to hang by his tail above the immobilized rodent and ordered Yves to recite from the Mutton Odes of Scapa Flow.  Deeply moved by this rhapsody, the lemur poured wondrous solvent from his banjo jonquil eyes and by peeling carefully, we were soon able to secure the grateful Cyprian’s release.  The patching of Hercules’ sartorius where it had been impressed by a flying squirrel’s dorsal ridge was but a small price to pay.  Cyprian took a celebratory turn with the pigeons and, since chaos is punctuated by ordered sets, we nearly lost him again as he swooped in front of a shuddering eighteen wheeler.  Basta! thought I – some discipline is needed at this worksite.  To that end, next morning I installed a punch clock in the very mouth of Minerva.  Ring them bells.

II Better Gnomes and Hard-ons

What was remarkable was that we all didn’t die when the economy did.  A lot of us, in fact, breathed more expansively and walked centimeters taller due to the natural dynamic of the spine reasserting itself in the absence of having to perform obeisant anticlines before calculating devices.

We behaved with the pneumatic self-consciousness of the recently baptized or those who have overcome a fearsome and ravaging addiction.  Yes, we wanted to believe that we were blessed at last – that henceforth all burdens would be lightened, that a cosmic hairpin had been turned – just imagine! – by us, not by one of a million precursor generations or our own telescoping progeny – but that this moment had been created and was being lived by and for us alone.

Of course, immediately, grave doubts set in.  Was our elation the equivalent of hearing the ancient boiler rumble to life through five railroad stories of a sagging old-law tenement when we all knew perfectly well that it would sputter out just at the point when the risers began to clank, the valves to wheeze, and before the water got really hot enough for a bath?  It was, no wordplay intended, cold comfort to know that we weren’t paying rent – eschewing a vestigial reflex act of custom that would have made no difference in the temperature.

Lacking metallurgy, draft animals or a written language, we persevered and, after a fashion, prospered…