“Assassin!” he accused. “What manner of weapon is that to kill a mighty monarch?” He gestured towards the fancy bedpan. “Have you no knife, no spear, no club?”
I held out my empty hands to show him I was unarmed.
“You wish to destroy the myth with the man, eh? You come not only to kill, but to degrade. Who sent you? Darius the Persian? I thought better of him, enemy though he is, than to stoop to this.”
“The only Persian I know is a pussycat named Horace,” I told him truthfully. “And she doesn’t even have any claws.”
“Horace? She?” He snorted. “You speak with a trident tongue.”
“Let’s leave my dentures out of this. The reason she’s called Horace is that the girl who owns her never thought to check until after she had kittens.”
“That’s just like a Persian,” he sneered. “No morals. And how could a girl have kittens?”
“She didn’t. Horace did.”
“Either way it’s supernatural. For a male cat, or a female human being to produce kittens is equally fantastic.”
“That’s logical,” I granted,
“I’m always logical. I studied with Aristotle,” he told me proudly.
That rang a bell. A warrior who rated eight guards, referred to himself as a monarch and spoke of Darius the Persian as an enemy; a royal youth who spoke Greek and had studied with Aristotle; he could only be one man —Alexander the Great!
“Are you Alexander the Great?” I asked him.
“I am Alexander of Macedon, ruler of all the Hellenic Isles, soon to be ruler of Persia and Egypt and other lands as well. The Great?” The phrase pleased him. “By Zeus! Why not? Who is greater? Nobody! Yes, I am Alexander the Great!”
“Nice to know you, Al.” I tried to be ingratiating. “I’m Steve Victor.”
“Stevictor.” He ran the names together and it came out Athenian. “You are a Greek?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Males that give birth,” he mused. “Humans delivered of kittens. And do you claim to be a god too?” It was a sneer, but there was just a hint of doubt in his voice.
“No. I’m a man. Just like you.”
“I am not a man,” he roared. “I am Alexander, Son of Zeus! I come from Olympus to conquer the world.” The light of the fanatic shone from his eyes. He really believed what he was saying. He waved to the sentry to come closer to me with the torch and strode towards me himself. “Let’s have a look at my fellow god,” he added sarcastically. As the light now illuminated my torso for the first time, Alexander stopped in his tracks. “By my father! What manner of assassin is this who comes to kill me as naked as a babe? Why have you no clothes?”
“It’s a long story,” I answered. “You see, I locked myself out of my apartment and—”
“Silence!” He moved a step closer. His eyes fell to my feet and he stopped again. “What manner of shoddy shodding is that?” He pointed at Denise’s pink and purple bedroom slippers.
“Shoddy shodding?” I was incapable of indignation too. “I’d hate to tell you what the lady these belonged to paid for them.”
“It is fit footwear only for Pan, the lesser of the woodland deities,” Alexander said insultingly. “Are you covering the cloven hooves of a goat, then?”
“I’ve got a bunion or two, but my tootsies are not c1oven,” I told him stiffly. “And neither are yours. Yet you say you are a god. Aristotle would point out that one doesn’t need cloven clodhoppers to be a god.” What the hell! Alexander seemed hung up on this superstitious nonsense, so why not throw him a few curves?
I didn’t have to throw the next one. He tossed it to himself. Standing right in front of me now, the reflection of the flickering torch bouncing off my gilded genitals caught his eye.
“The Golden Phallus!” Alexander exclaimed. He became very pale. “Then you are from Olympus!”
Why not? I was moving up in the world. From a caveman’s god to a Greek deity struck me as some kind of promotion. Particularly since no less a personage than Alex the Great—who, after all, considered himself a god too—now seemed to be granting me similar status.
“It takes one to know one,” I told him charitably.
“Then you do confirm that I am descended from Zeus?” he asked in a very low voice so that the guard might not overhear the doubt implied by the question.
“You’re every bit as much a god as I am,” I assured him.
“It’s very good of you to say so.” He was hooked. “And now I’ll have somebody to talk to. Frankly, just between us deities, being a god is a lonely business. I mean, you just can’t avoid talking down to people. You can’t really relate, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh, I do,” I agreed.
“Back to your post,” he ordered the sentry. When the soldier had gone, Alexander turned to me warmly. “Now that we’re alone,” he suggested, “we can have a real god-to-god talk.”
Well, people in the same line of work do have a lot of things in common. Alex’s side of the conversation went along with that assumption. He came on like it was Lights Out at sleepaway camp and first confession of those whispered fears about getting warts on your hands, or could it really make you go crazy. It got so sticky chummy in that tent I almost expected him to get all choked up with did I worry about being adopted when I was a little kid the way he did.
He came close at that. Still in the god-to-god bag, I listened sympathetically to Alex’s self doubts about his godhood. You see, godding it wasn’t just his thing, it was also his hang-up. Like most hang-ups, it stemmed right from the old family oak.
Look at it this way. Napoleon’s father made it with his mother, and how would that make you feel if it was your mother? The best historical authorities cannot say with certainty that at the age of six Caligula did not wet his pants. And at some time, somebody must have toilet-trained Hitler!
Alexander the Great? Well, with Al it was the father bit. Plus playing Oedipus to Mama, of course. Actually, it was classical. Which, I suppose, is only fitting.
His father was Philip of Macedon, an overly authoritative type with a great deal of unsuppressed violence. He spent his life overcompensating for his poor self-concept. As a Macedonian, Phil was a member of a minority group despised by the Greeks. One Athenian blueblood described him as “not even a barbarian from a respectable country—no, a pestilent fellow of Macedon, a country from which we never got even a decent slave.” Philip responded by chopping up Greeks until he’d almost, but not quite, minced them into a Greek salad of unity to fill his own personal salad bowl. It was left for Alexander to add the Persian dressing and other Eastern spices. This was only just, since as a boy Alexander received much of the overflow of his father’s sometimes hostile authoritativeness.
All right, Zigmund, ve miggzing ein Freudian stew, it should coming up one conqueror of Die Welt. Already, in the pot ein Prussian Vater plus a couple siblings Alexander wipes out and now he should compete mit der Vater- vigure, what kind dumplings we gonna dump in? Prosit! Heil! for Alte Heidelberg! Ziggy, du bist 100% right. Add ein Mama what iss overindulgent, overprotective, overambitious, overseductive and an Uber-Mama all the way. Plus she should be meshuginah in der Kopf und dig a bissel blood in her beer just like Papa does. Ziggy, ah so, just such a bitch iss Olympias, Mutter of Alexander Der Grosse.
A kinder view would be that Olympias was simply one of those unfortunate women who suffer from premenstrual tension—and menstrual tension and postmenstrual tension as well. That would be a day-to-day evaluation. The larger picture might show that she suffered the frustration of ineptitude prior to puberty, aggressive nymphomania for the next thirty-odd years, and feelings of deprivation and resentment from then until she was finally laid in her grave. Naturally, the poor woman had to let off steam. She did this in two ways.