BALTHAZAR'S COMMODITIES (fiction)

Balthazar is a character I made up so I can talk about things like what is real, what is simply fabulized, what is fiction and what is fact.  Is there such a thing as fact? If you believe in a fiction will it become real?  Like the puppet or the rabbit that becomes real?  Or were they already real and simply revealed.

Balthazar was a SW tribal member but built more like a Plains Indian, tall and rangy like a basketball player.  Dark, not quite black.  But he wasn’t into sports.  He was peaceful, but you didn’t push him around.  He liked to sit in the back of the local churches, any of them, but never when there were people present.  He just liked to sit with the lights off, wrapped in silence.

When Balthazar was fourteen he had become a favorite of a missionary in his home town who seduced/adopted him and took him along when the cleric was transferred to China because of questions in the US.  The missionary was genuinely fond of the boy, treated him well, and provided an infinite number of books to read that were not at all religious but possibly could be interpreted as erotically spiritual.  When the missionary was killed — don’t ask how or why — Balthazar joined the military and succeeded very well because he spoke several languages and could attune himself to the most impenetrable of those who went masked, both white and Asian. Few Blacks masked.  One told him that the best reaction to tragedy was hilarity.  He was quoting.  But the young man rarely laughed, often smiled.  That was more seductive.  Curiosity is seductive.

After service in Vietnam — or maybe it was Korea — he landed in San Francisco during the Great Culture Revolution that set so many men free from near slavery in offices.  He became a famous sex worker, using some of the tricks he learned in the Asian countries where the understandings about human eroticism were quite different.  When the plague came, he went north to the Canadian border where there had always been bordellos scattered east/west along the boundary, mostly female workers to entertain those resource workers who were not good at cards or pool.  Most of those women were voluntary, knew no other life.  Some married local and stayed.

Balthazar bought a huge commodities warehouse, timber-built, from the very early time of paternal government.  After days of scrubbing the insides, all of which he did alone, he put Persian rugs on the floors, hung French chandeliers from the rafters, and unfolded Chinese screens with gold-leaf bamboo and elegantly depicted cranes.  He did not paint or plaster or paper.

His reputation spread and some clients came in small chartered airplanes to the grass landing strip not far away.  Their pilots had to watch the weather closely, even in summer.  There was no chance that anyone could come in a Lear Jet and anyway people on that socioeconomic level were already so pandered to that the only thing they could feel was a jolt in the stock market.

One day a famous mathematician came.  He wasn’t really famous except for other mathematicians.  His life was measured by blackboard equations until one day they replaced all his blackboards with white boards and took away his chalk.  He hated the fiber pens which always ran out and came in too many colors and didn’t squeak like chalk.  The smell of the ink was too strong.  Chalk didn’t smell.  Ink made marks on his clothes that could not be removed. It was as though the world changed.  It had.  He became very disturbed and upset, needing some kind of intervention.

So he came to this commodity warehouse of a sensualist to help him find a half of himself that he’d lost. He had to ask for help to guide him to the commodity warehouse, which was unchanged from the time of its first use in the 19th century, except that it had been built in a cottonwood grove once by a river which fortunately had changed course so that it didn’t flood the building.  But there was still enough moisture for many tall bushes to cluster around the old hulk, disguising it and erasing all paths and roads.

Balthazar was a Scheherazadian.  He worked narratively, but first he prepared tea for the two of them.  The herbs were local but off the mountain slopes nearby.  They lulled the math man into sleep.  Balthazar slipped out to the grove and cut an armload of honeysuckle, just then in bloom.  He brought it in to stand in a huge Egyptian pot, scenting the shadowy space.  The man was still asleep but he began to mutter.  He dreamt.

“When I was but a child, still in one of those small beds that was not quite a crib and not quite a bed, my window was open.  Honeysuckle grew there.  Hummingbirds came and probed the blooms with their bills, drawing out nectar and shedding pollen.  It was sex.  I thought they were the most beautiful and arousing things I had ever seen. Then I realized I was hearing something very high and fierce.  It was them!  They were fighting, jealous.”

Balthazar knew how to make the sounds of warlike hummingbirds, shimmering and screeching but barely perceptible.  He made those sounds and entered the dream.

“I swore I would never be like that, that I would never let sex and hunger and passion get to me, put me in danger, deceive me.”

There comes a point in the story when possibilities diverge.  This is, of course, all made up and none of it exists at all.  In one version, Balthazar carries a syringe of sweet release into the dream and kills the math man.  The needle is the hummingbird’s beak.  It could be made into an image, embroidered on a pillow.  People think of the birds as precious, jeweled, vulnerable, peaceful.  They are not any of those things.

Or the story could go another way.  The little plane could return, the math man get into it and transfer to a bigger plane that took him to a middle Eurasian country with a name that ended in “stan,” fighting for its life.  He could use his math skills for . . . designing bombs? Helping them to draw laundered money out of what was supposed to be protected for oligarchs by doctoring statistics and bookkeeping?  Or would he fall in love but always have at hand a blackboard and some chalk? Give the local children boxes of colored chalk so they could draw hummingbirds and honeysuckle on the rubble?

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So now I’m going to tear up this story the way I usually do without sharing it with others.  If you’re one of those people who want to pretend it’s magic, there’s the first problem, right there.

The thing about being taken in and then transported to China by a lover of adolescent boys who is a priest is not unprecedented — not even unlikely, the way things are going.  The chances of him supplying “erotically spiritual books” is not likely though such books exist, some classic because sex and the senses are always close to the spiritual unless some Puritan has been messing around.  This is especially true on the Eastern and Southern sides of Eurasia.  It is not unlikely that a priest with this kind of indiscretion would be killed or simply missing.

Connecting sexwork to the great culture shift of SF is not entirely virtuous, since it was all over the continent of North America and more, but didn’t have to be covert in SF.  Then it was made indelible by AIDS.  Nevertheless there was an achievement of “critical mass” that pushed into dramatic life and death a number of affinity groups that put sex first, which was easier if one had a penis.  They’re pretty fascinating organs anyway, but when they become so crucial to identity they are, shall we say, engorged.  This should not be made trivial, only a plot point.

Bringing the story to the place up here where I am could be seen as lazy or using what I know.  I’m playing with the “commodity warehouse” which was simply where the Blackfeet Free School and Sandwich Shop found its home for a little while.  The setting was that of the original Tribal Council building.  However, the inside decore is from the studio of a famous artist who shall remain anonymous.  It’s supposed to be more gay than girly. 

This story is far TOO “girly” (tea??) and curtsies too much to the nicer patches of Freudian theory, which has to do with the probs of adults beginning with some kind of screen theory that happened in childhood.  My internal mockery of this is in the hummingbirds and the honeysuckle, which are simply cute, though they are real enough.  They ARE sexual, but not many people are obsessed with them.

The end possible fates of the client simply arise from having to finish the story.  Such attempts to resolve one’s life issue (having to change) then having another transformative effect is silly.  On the other hand, there may have been other forces, like political awareness or sentimentality about children or maturing.  And other purposes on the part of the author, who is sometimes reluctant to bring everyone down because then they won’t read the next story.  Thus, I will put aside that old faithful Freudian thanatos, though it begins to seem useful.  Maybe even meaningful.  Maybe I’ll try again later.