Think of the sweetest, most wonderful things you’ve ever experienced in your life…just randomly, off the top of your head…things as ineffably sublime as the beautiful butterfly which aroused the businessman in XOXO’s poem.…Now, make a list. For instance:
It’s 1960 in Jersey City and you’re falling asleep in your mom’s lap on a Hudson Boulevard bus to the metronomic cadence of the windshield wipers and the sound of the tires on the rainy street, and sitting all around you are nuns and stooped gray men in fedoras.
Egg-drop soup and egg rolls at the Jade Restaurant in Journal Square, Jersey City.
The gurgle of watercoolers and the pungent aroma of legal accordion folders in the supply room at 26 Journal Square.
Mid-1960s, late afternoon, drinking Yoo-hoo with your dad at the driving range, and then, later that night, sitting in front of the TV with him and the intro for Combat! comes on (“Combat! Starring Vic Morrow and Rick Jason”), and your dad offers you a stick of Black Jack gum.
Eating tea sandwiches with your mom at the Bird Cage in Lord & Taylor, in Millburn, New Jersey.
The first movie scenes that gave you a hard-on: when seaman John Mills (played by Richard Harris) gets flogged with a cat-o’-nine-tails in Mutiny on the Bounty (also Harris’s O-Kee-Pa suspension initiation ritual in A Man Called Horse); and when Candace Hilligoss gets out of the bathtub in Carnival of Souls (to creepy organ music), also the scene where Candace Hilligoss tries different stations on the car radio (but can only get creepy organ music), and the scene where Candace Hilligoss takes her clothes off in the dressing room at the department store (to creepy organ music); and also when Martine Carol emerges from her bathtub in Lucrèce Borgia (aka Sins of the Borgias), and also, in the same movie, when she’s whipped by her brother, Cesare (played by Pedro Armendáriz).
That moment in the early ’90s when there were three made-for-TV movies about Amy Fisher: The Amy Fisher Story (Drew Barrymore), Amy Fisher: My Story (Noelle Parker), and Casualties of Love: The Long Island Lolita Story (Alyssa Milano); and then, soon, Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly’s “Wedding Video” sex tape came out.
That total goose bump moment in the Pet Shop Boys song “What Have I Done to Deserve This?” when Dusty Springfield starts to sing (“Since you went away, I’ve been hanging around / I’ve been wondering why I’m feeling down”).
In 2004, the long-awaited pedestrian bridge over Kennedy Boulevard (formerly Hudson Boulevard) links the East Campus and the West Campus of St. Peter’s College in Jersey City.
Nice and drunk on Chivas Regal, eating ravioli, first heavy snow falling outside, fat girl at the bar (nice and drunk too) smiles at you.
Each of these numinous moments, these epiphanies, is of the Gods, a manifestation, a Godding (Götterung), and in each we are able to unmistakably discern the hand of a specific God. Mogul Magoo’s fingerprints are all over those egg rolls at the Jade in Journal Square. And, surely, we can identify, in the pedestrian bridge that spans Kennedy Boulevard, linking the two campuses of St. Peter’s College, the animating spirit of La Muñeca. And who else could have been behind the unprecedented phenomenon of Amy Fisher and Tonya Harding but La Felina, the fanatical champion of unsublimated passion and base motives, who glories in authentic intensities like lust, jealousy, and vengeance? The Fisher/Harding upheaval seemed to augur an astonishing revolution in the sociology of glamour — the erotic exaltation of the homely, unscrupulous, working-class girl. But it was so short-lived as to actually be a last gasp, because reality entertainment almost immediately reverted to a depressingly predictable perversion of all that, exalting instead the Hilton/Richie/Kardashian axis of “beautiful” celebutantes. This development so infuriated La Felina that, at one point, she was about to unleash a hybrid of Charles Manson and Pol Pot on America to completely purge it of every single “beautiful” celebutante when Fast-Cooking Ali dissuaded her at the very last minute, not because he was against the idea but because they were incredibly late to something, and La Felina — who exalts the physically deformed and the mentally unbalanced and the sans-culottes and the scum of the earth, and who wet her pants during the September Massacres of 1792—decided to shelve the plan for another time.
By some unspoken consensus, the Gods determined one day that their Belle Époque was over and that it was time to disperse for a while, for each God and Goddess to go his or her own way. This was the Diaspora of the Gods. Several stayed in the vicinity of the Gods’ original “bus stop,” which experts have speculatively situated in the Abell 1835 Galaxy, some 13 billion light-years from Earth, while others place it in the Markarian 421 Galaxy, which is located in the constellation Ursa Major, a mere 360 million light-years away. Some Gods (e.g., El Brazo), of course, moved into Versailles-like coral and onyx palaces and sumptuous frangipani-scented hermitages miles underground in what is now Antarctica. Los Vatos Locos submerged themselves in a peat bog in Denmark for several million years. While some pursued esoteric, purely theoretical existences in strange, impalpable, zero-dimensional realms, others chose drab, quotidian lives (à la Jenny from the block) in small cities in the Midwest. Mogul Magoo, Shanice, and the Pistoleras inhabited the lush mountains of the Gondwana supercontinent. Lady Rukia and Doc Hickory lived on a cul-de-sac in Chula Vista, California. The lovers La Felina and Fast-Cooking Ali — both avatars of humility and self-denial — shrunk themselves down to about three micrometers tall (the size of a typical yeast cell) and lived in the anal scent-gland of a capybara named Dawson in the remote Caura forest in southern Venezuela. And then, one day in 1973, by some unspoken consensus, the Gods determined that their Diaspora was over and that they would all reconvene and, from here on in, occupy the top floors of the world’s tallest and most opulent skyscraper. Thus began a nomadic period during which the Gods constantly moved, en masse, from what had become the former tallest-building-in-the-world to the latest tallest-building-the-world. So, in the summer of 1973, the Gods and Goddesses all moved into the top floors of the Sears Tower (now known as the Willis Tower) in Chicago, Illinois. They then relocated, in 1998, to the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; the Taipei 101 in Taiwan, in 2004; the Shanghai World Financial Center in China, in 2008; and finally, in 2009, the Burj Khalifa in the Business Bay district of Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The Burj Khalifa is 2,717 feet tall. And this is where the Gods currently reside.