Twelve Romances from the Hellenic Golden Age Turned into a Dozen Stories about Greek Love
Apollo is the son of Jupiter, who is president of the gods, and Latona, an old girlfriend of Jupiter’s whom he never married. Apollo is the god of handguns, Blue Cross coverage, and elaborate home stereo systems. Also, he is the god of getting a dark and even tan.
Apollo’s first love was a girl named Daphne, and this came about because of the anger of Cupid, the god of interpersonal relationships. Apollo, as befits a god, possesses perfect marksmanship. In fact, it was his celestial hand that steadied the .44 caliber pistol when the Son of Sam murdered all the pale girls who weren’t carrying adequate medical insurance. And it was also Apollo who guided the shots that hit John Lennon because of the awful mixing quality on the Plastic Ono Band album. Apollo was chaffing Cupid about that deity’s recent change to automatic weapons, which Cupid insisted was necessary to keep up with the fast-paced shifts in modern emotional involvement. Apollo was saying that Cupid could not hit the long side of a supertanker with an Uzi, so Cupid let him have it with one of his deep-felt emotional-commitment rounds. Then Cupid fired a couple of the bullets that make women want careers. And these struck Daphne, who was a beautiful tennis-court nymph. Apollo was immediately smitten with Daphne, but she wanted to go to law school. Apollo followed Daphne around and pestered her and phoned her in the middle of the night all the time until Daphne became annoyed and called upon Diana, the goddess of women who are searching for self-fulfillment, and asked that august deity to turn her into a female Family Court judge. Apollo wept when he saw the transformation. But he still loved Daphne, and to this day, whenever Apollo spies a case of child abuse where the youngster’s injuries aren’t covered by a private or corporate medical plan, he has the parents arrested and their case placed on Daphne’s court docket.
Juno is the first lady of Olympus and the goddess of acting like a married woman. She keeps a close eye on her husband, Jupiter. One day while Juno was straightening up around heaven she saw a large smog cloud descend over the usually sunny climes of Southern California. Juno suspected Jupiter of causing this smog to conceal some activity of his. So she called upon Zephyr, an arctic air mass high-pressure zone causing local high winds and cold temperatures, to blow the smog away. Then Jupiter was revealed in a motel room with a Datsun. Juno guessed that the Datsun’s form concealed some fair beauty, transformed for concealment’s sake. And she was right, for it was Io, daughter of the Imperial Valley irrigation sprinkler system god Inachus. Jupiter had been dallying with her all afternoon in the motel.
Juno quickly joined her husband and praised the beauty of the compact car in his room. Jupiter claimed that he had just created it from a bedspring and a room-sized refrigerator unit on commission for a Japanese car company. Juno asked to have it as a gift. What could Jupiter do? He was loath to give his girlfriend to his wife, but how could he refuse Juno such a trifling request as a new Japanese car, especially one that got such good mileage? So he consented. Juno was still suspicious, however, and took the car to Argus to be closely watched.
Now, Argus was a beast with a hundred eyes and at least that many concealed microphones and wiretaps. He worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, even though he wasn’t supposed to because its charter forbids domestic operations. Anyway, Argus never slept or at least didn’t sleep very well unless he took two Nembutals, which his doctor had forbidden him for fear that he was developing a barbiturate dependency. So Argus kept Io under round-the-clock surveillance.
Jupiter was very upset by these developments, and so he called for Mercury. Mercury presides over big business, professional wrestling, running political campaigns, and illegal dumping of toxic waste—over all things, in other words, which require cleverness, dexterity, and two sets of account ledgers. Mercury is also the United Parcel Service delivery truck driver of the gods and wears a winged cap and wingtip shoes. Jupiter instructed Mercury to go to Argus and “lean on him a little.” So Mercury pretended to be from the staff of a Senate subcommittee investigation and read to Argus from a book of government rules and regulations about clandestine intelligence operations for hours until every one of Argus’s eyes closed and he was asleep. Then Mercury had him blown up by a right-wing Cuban expatriate group.
So Io escaped and drove down the highway to Palm Springs, but Juno sent a gas shortage to afflict her and she had to wait for hours and hours in a gas line in Compton, and her hubcaps were stolen. At last Jupiter interceded and, by promising to pay no further attentions to Io, convinced Juno to relent. Which she did, and furthermore Juno even went so far as to get Io a good part in a new thriller movie from Paramount, where we will be seeing her soon in a car chase all over Asia Minor.
Leander was a youth from Santa Monica, and Hero lived many miles away in Laurel Canyon, where she was a priestess of Venus, the goddess of mixed doubles, eye makeup, and random rape slayings. Every weekend Leander used to marathon-run all the way from Santa Monica to Laurel Canyon. But one weekend the weather wasn’t very good and Leander decided to lift weights instead. And he never saw Hero or called her again. Some weeks later Hero saw Leander marathon-running with another girl, and she was so despondent that she began marathon-running also and now she feels a lot better about herself.
Diana is the virgin (with men, anyway) goddess of female self-actualization. She is also the protectoress of wives who have shot their husbands in the back of the head with a .38 after fifteen or twenty years of marriage and then get off with a plea of self-defense by saying their spouse used to whip them with a belt.
One day Actaeon, a noted job hunter, was out looking for work and accidentally saw Diana naked, or, some say, even worse, in a pretty, frilly dress. Diana turned Actaeon into an employer, and he was set upon by OSHA investigators who made him post danger signs in six languages over all his drill presses and give every member of his bookkeeping staff a hard hat and build a new $40,000 restroom for women workers with couches where they could lie down if they were having their periods. Eventually he was hounded into bankruptcy.
Pygmalion was a fashion photographer who was homosexual and hated women. However, he had one model whom he had discovered while she was waiting tables in Redondo Beach, and he fixed her hair and did her makeup and showed her how to dress, and when he was done she was so beautiful that he fell in love with her even though he was queer. So Pygmalion prayed to Venus, the style and leisure section goddess, to transform the fashion model into a human woman, and—miracle of miracles—it was done. They both lived happily ever after until the fashion model met a movie actor and ran off to Kauai with him.
Orpheus was the son of Apollo and the muse Car Stereo. When Orpheus was a boy his father presented him with a Sony Walkman and a collection of Bix Beiderbecke tape cassettes. Nothing could withstand the charm of this music. Not only were Orpheus’s friends and relatives entranced by the tunes but even the stock market could be lulled into a day of light trading by the fine melodic improvisations of Beiderbecke’s cornet and the prime rate could be induced to drop a point or more.
Orpheus fell in love with the beautiful Eurydice, but unfortunately she stepped on a cancer cell during their honeymoon and was killed by a bad movie plot. Orpheus went to the underworld in search of his bride. There he found his way barred by the great three-headed dog Cerberus, who has one head representing inadequate gun control, another head representing unemployment, and a third head representing judicial leniency and backlogged court calendars. Cerberus relented, however, when Orpheus let him wear the Walkman on his unemployment head and listen to “In a Mist.” After that Orpheus talked to a number of underworld figures and many of them turned out to be real Beiderbecke fans too. They agreed to let Eurydice out of the movie contract where she had to die from the special kind of cancer that only actresses get (and which lets them keep their looks even after they’re supposed to have been on chemotherapy for six months). The only condition was that Orpheus was never to look at the videotapes of what Eurydice had been doing while she was associating with reputed members of organized-crime families. But Orpheus couldn’t resist taking a peek, and it ruined their marriage.
Penelope was the wife of the war hero Ulysses, who had been an officer in Vietnam. He was overseas for a long time and Penelope felt like he was never coming back. So she had a lot of suitors. But Ulysses did come back, and when he did he killed all of Penelope’s men friends. And he would have gone to jail if the jury hadn’t decided that he was suffering from post-Vietnam stress syndrome and therefore had been temporarily insane.
Echo was a sauna, Jacuzzi, and hot-tub nymph who never had anything original to say, and Narcissus suffered from a narcissistic personality disorder and was somewhat neurotic. They dated for a while but it didn’t really work out. She’s got a job now as a production assistant at Lorimar and he’s trying to make it as a male model.
Pyramus was the best-looking boy and Thisbe was the cutest girl in all of Tarzana Junior High School. But even though they lived right next door to each other their parents wouldn’t let them date because each family thought the other family wasn’t Jewish. So the only way Pyramus and Thisbe could get together was at the tennis club or at parties or in school or at the beach or in the shopping mall or at dances or on the weekends.
One night Pyramus and Thisbe agreed to meet secretly on the boardwalk in Venice. Thisbe got there first, but before Pyramus came to meet her she was chased by a Mexican street gang, and as she ran away she dropped her purse. Pyramus arrived shortly, and when he came to the place where he was supposed to meet Thisbe he saw her purse where it had fallen with all of its contents spilled out on the sidewalk. “Alas,” spoke Pyramus, “Thisbe has been chased by a Mexican street gang and doubtless raped and will now have all sorts of hang-ups about sex and will have to go to group therapy sessions and also her birth-control pills are lying here on the ground and have been crushed by roller skaters and she’s probably not going to want to fuck anyway until she gets the prescription refilled. I guess I’ll turn queer.” But Thisbe had escaped from the gang of Mexicans and was returning to the place where she had vowed to meet Pyramus just as Pyramus tried to pick up a member of another Mexican street gang. So they both got raped.
On the very spot the three Fates, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos—who stitch the cloth of human destiny into slacks and have the cuffs altered to determine man’s life span—have caused a mulberry tree to be planted with berries red as blood. But this has nothing to do with our story and was the result of an earlier car wreck.
Proserpine was the beautiful daughter of Ceres, goddess of farm price supports and of balancing economic development with ecological concerns. Proserpine used to hang around with Pluto, an underworld big shot. They eloped and were married in Reno and then Pluto carried her off either to Hell or to the 1948 Democratic National Convention—it being difficult to tell the difference in the matter of smoke and noise. Ceres was wroth. She searched everywhere for her daughter and in her anger she caused wheat rust and weevils and leaf blight and soil erosion and a really incompetent Department of Agriculture bureaucracy under the Truman administration, thus bringing much distress to mankind. At long last the whereabouts of Proserpine came to light during the Senate’s Kefauver Committee hearings on organized crime. Ceres sent her lawyer to make a deal with Pluto, and in return for immunity from federal prosecution Pluto allowed Proserpine to visit her mother during the spring and summer at the Ceres family truck farm near El Centro. And that is how the different seasons of the year came into being. Thus, to this day, for half the year we have floods and droughts and depressed prices on the commodities market and the rest of the time we have drug smuggling, extortion, murder, and theft.
The myth of Cupid and Psyche is a difficult myth to understand. Psyche was a beautiful young girl whom the god of liking people a lot fell in love with by accident when he shot himself in the foot. They got married, but it was an open marriage and Psyche wasn’t supposed to see Cupid hardly at all. However, as it turned out, she saw quite a lot of him and caught more than a little grief from his possessive mother, Venus. Everything turned out all right in the long run, though, and Psyche was made an immortal by having her picture on the cover of People magazine.
The true meaning of this myth can only be understood by spending years in analysis with a Freudian psychiatrist who needs words like “psyche” to explain vague things he probably shouldn’t be poking his nose into anyway.
Part of Cupid’s problems probably have to do with the fact that his mother, Venus, once fell in love with Adonis, a professional skier, and Cupid witnessed that young man’s death in a chairlift accident. Venus was greatly grieved and transformed the fallen slalom racer into an eternal personal vibrator. As a result, Cupid still has ambivalent feelings about the active expression of female sexual needs.