I looked at the bottom of my own shoe, hoping to perhaps see strands of stickiness there, like melted cheese tethering me to the ground. When your best friend is the son of God, you get tired of losing every argument. “Just because you can’t see it, doesn’t mean the world is not sticky.”
Joshua rolled his eyes. “Let’s go swimming.” He took off down the hill.
“What about the God?” I asked. “You can’t see him.”
Joshua stopped halfway down the hill and held his arms out to the shining, aquamarine sea. “You can’t?”
“That’s a crappy argument, Josh.” I followed him down the hill, shouting as I went. “If you’re not going to try, I’m not going to argue with you anymore. So, what if stickiness is like God? You know, how He abandons our people and leads them into slavery whenever we stop believing in Him. Stickiness could be like that. You could float off into the sky any time now because you don’t believe in stickiness.”
“It’s good that you have something to believe in, Biff. I’m going in the water.” He ran down the beach, shedding his clothes as he went, then dove into the surf, naked.
Later, after we’d both swallowed enough salt water to make us sick, we headed up the coast to the city of Ptolemais.
“I didn’t think it would be so salty,” Joshua said.
“Yeah,” I said, “you’d never know it by looking at it.”
“Are you still angry about your round-earth-stickiness theory?”
“I don’t expect you to understand,” I said, sounding very mature, I thought. “You being a virgin and all.”
Joshua stopped and grabbed my shoulder, forcing me to wheel around and face him. “The night you spent with Maggie I spent praying to my father to take away the thoughts of you two. He didn’t answer me. It was like trying to sleep on a bed of thorns. Since we left I was beginning to forget, or at least leave it behind, but you keep throwing it in my face.”
“You’re right,” I said. “I forgot how sensitive you virgins can be.”
Then, once again, and not for the last time, the Prince of Peace coldcocked me. A bony, stonecutter’s fist just over my right eye. He hit harder than I remembered. I remember white seabirds in the sky above me, and just a wisp of clouds across the sky. I remember the frothy surf sloshing over my face, leaving sand in my ears. I remember thinking that I should get up and smite Josh upside the head. I remember thinking then that if I got up, Josh might hit me again, so I lay there for a moment, just thinking.
“So, what do you want?” I said, finally, from my wet and sandy supinity.
He stood over me with his fists balled. “If you’re going to keep bringing it up, you have to tell me the details.”
“I can do that.”
“And don’t leave anything out.”
“Nothing?”
“I’ve got to know if I’m going to understand sin.”
“Okay, can I get up? My ears are filling with sand.”
He helped me to my feet and as we entered the seaside city of Ptolomais, I taught Josh about sex.
Down narrow stone streets between high stone walls.
“Well, most of what we learned from the rabbis was not exactly accurate.”
Past men sitting outside their houses, mending their nets. Children selling cups of pomegranate juice, women hanging strings of fish from window to window to dry.
“For instance, you know that part right after Lot’s wife gets turned to stone and then his daughters get drunk and fornicate with him?”
“Right, after Sodom and Gomorrah are destroyed.”
“Well, that’s not as bad as it sounds,” I said.
We passed Phoenician women who sang as they pounded dried fish into meal. We passed evaporation pools where children scraped the encrusted salt from the rocks and put it into bags.
“But fornication is a sin, and fornication with your daughters, well, that’s a, I don’t know, that’s a double-dog sin.”
“Yeah, but if you put that aside for a second, and you just focus on the two young girls aspect of it, it’s not nearly as bad as it sounds initially.”
“Oh.”
We passed merchants selling fruit and bread and oil, spices and incense, calling out claims of quality and magic in their wares. There was a lot of magic for sale in those days.
“And the Song of Solomon, that’s a lot closer, and you can sort of understand Solomon having a thousand wives. In fact, with you being the Son of God and all, I don’t think you’d have any problem getting that many girls. I mean, after you figure out what you’re doing.”
“And a lot of girls is a good thing?”
“You’re a ninny, aren’t you?”
“I thought you’d be more specific. What does Maggie have to do with Lot and Solomon?”
“I can’t tell you about me and Maggie, Josh. I just can’t.”
We were passing a lick of prostitutes gathered outside the door of an inn. Their faces were painted, their skirts slit up the side to show their legs glistening with oil, and they called to us in foreign languages and made tiny dances with their hands as we passed.
“What the hell are they saying?” I asked Joshua. He was better with languages. I think they were speaking Greek.
“They said something about how they like Hebrew boys because we can feel a woman’s tongue better without our foreskins.” He looked at me as if I might confirm or deny this.
“How much money do we have?” I asked.
The inn rented rooms, stalls, and space under the eave to sleep. We rented two adjacent stalls, which was a bit of a luxury for us, but an important one for Joshua’s education. After all, weren’t we on this journey so he could learn to take his rightful place as the Messiah?
“I’m not sure if I should watch,” Joshua said. “Remember David was running over the roofs and happened onto Bathsheba in her bath. That set a whole chain of sin in motion.”
“But listening won’t be a problem.”
“I don’t think it’s the same thing.”
“Are you sure that you don’t want to try this yourself, Josh? I mean, the angel was never clear about your being with a woman.” To be honest, I was a little frightened myself. My experience with Maggie hardly qualified me to be with a harlot.
“No, you go ahead. Just describe what’s happening and what you’re feeling. I have to understand sin.”
“Okay, if you insist.”
“Thank you for doing this for me, Biff.”
“Not just for you, Josh, for our people.”
So that’s how we ended up with the two stalls. Josh would be in one while I, along with the harlot of my choice, instructed him from the other in the fine art of fornication.
Back out at the front of the inn I shopped for my teaching assistant. It was an eight-harlot inn, if that’s how you measure an inn. (I understand that now they measure inns in stars. We are in a four-star inn right now. I don’t know what the conversion from harlots to stars is.) Anyway, there were eight harlots outside the inn that day. They ranged in age from only a few years older than us to older than our mothers. And they ran the gamut of shapes and sizes, having in common only that they were all highly painted and well oiled.
“They’re all so…so nasty-looking.”
“They’re harlots, Biff. They’re supposed to be nasty-looking. Pick one.”
“Let’s go look at some different harlots.” We had been standing a few doors down from the harlots, but they knew we were watching. I walked over and stopped close to a particularly tall harlot and said, “Excuse me, do you know where we might find a different selection of harlots? No offense, it’s just that my friend and I…”
And she pulled open her blouse, exposing full breasts that were glistening with oil and flecks of mica, and she threw her skirt aside and stepped up so a long leg slid behind me and I could feel the rough hair between her legs grinding against my hip and her rouged nipples brushed my cheek and in that instant profound wood did from my person protrude.
“This one will be fine, Josh.”
The other harlots let loose with an exaltation of ululation as we led my harlot away. (You know ululation as the sound an ambulance makes. That I get an erection every time one passes the hotel would seem morbid if you didn’t know this story of how Biff Hires a Harlot.) The harlot’s name was Set. She was a head and a half taller than me, with skin the color of a ripe date, wide brown eyes flecked with gold, and hair so black that it reflected blue in the dim light of the stable. She was the perfect harlot design, wide where a harlot should be wide, narrow where a harlot should be narrow, delicate of ankle and neck, sturdy of conscience, intrepid and single-minded of goal once she was paid. She was an Egyptian, but she had learned Greek and a little Latin to help lubricate the discourse of her trade. Our situation required more creativity than she seemed accustomed to, but after a heavy sigh she mumbled something about “if you fuck a Hebrew, make room in the bed for his guilt,” then pulled me into my stall and closed the gate. (Yes, the stalls were used for animals. There was a donkey in the stall opposite Josh’s.)