THE MID-LIFE CRISIS OF DIONYSUS

ionysus, the god of wine and whoopee, the son of Zeus and Semele, Dionysus the eternal party animal, to his great surprise one sun-drenched afternoon suddenly turned fifty years of age as he reclined on a languid young woman in his temple on Mount Cithaeron in Boeotia. He was dipping his finger into a very fine 1925 B.C. Pinot Noir and swabbing it onto her lips, and he was fussing about the orgy scheduled for that evening, saying that he had laid in six gallons of extra-virgin cold-pressed olive oil—“You think that’s too much or not enough?” he asked—“All depends,” she said, licking the wine off her lower lip with her rough pink tongue. He said he hoped that nobody would use Roquefort salad dressing at the orgy, it was hard to clean the cheese out of his ears, and then he heard the unmistakable clip-clomp-clomp of the sensible shoes of the Muse of maturity, Gladys, clambering up the steps, clipboard in hand, knapsack on her back, wearing a frumpy brown dress with sweat stains under the arms. She blew a hard tweet on her whistle and cried, “Climb off that girl, Gramps, and put down the beverage. And brace yourself for a major news item,” and then she broke it to him hard. He was fifty. Fifty years old.

Dionysus sat up—“What?” he said, letting go of the supple young woman. “Fifty. Ha! I’m immortal! Ageless! You can look it up!”

“Everybody gets just so much immortality and then it’s time to grow up,” said Gladys in her deep horsy voice. “You were young for thousands of years, like everybody else, and now you’re fifty. Better face the music and learn to dance to it.”

But acceptance was not part of Dionysus’ godly nature. He was the god of revels, the god who resisted dull care and deadlines and the long grim slide of mortality, the one who always shouted, “Play, gypsy fiddlers, play! Dance on, you fools! Throw the theologians in the cellar and bring us more oysters and more hot sauce! More young women! And make them even younger!” He wasn’t ready to sit in a sunny corner with a knitted comforter on his lap and chuckle to himself over geezer news in the newspaper.

He looked at her, dumpy Gladys! and laughed his big careless laugh, haw, haw, haw, and tossed his raven tresses, which suddenly felt—what? thin? his hair? Dionysus’? He touched it delicately. The hair was there, sort of, but it felt stringy, not flowing as before, not flowing fluidly and bouncing. It hung like dry dead moss.

The young woman squirmed away and put on a robe. She kissed him nicely on the cheek, said “Thanks, lover,” and wandered off to find a toothbrush.

Dionysus strode to the edge of the reflecting pool and looked down. His hands looked old, mottled, with big ropy veins, the skin wrinkly and raspy as a lizard’s. Big tufts of hair poked from his ears, and his jawline felt poorly defined, his chin seemed not so much to thrust forward as to be a lump atop his neck, and his chest had descended about five inches. “Who did this to me?” he asked. “Whose handiwork is this?”

Gladys shrugged. “You don’t look that bad, mister. Your back looks youthful. And your prostate’s okay. So far. Slightly enlarged but good for another two or three years anyway. Your brain function seems fairly sound, considering. Health’s good, considering. You’re no gem but you’re in good shape. You should live well into your senility and beyond.”

Dionysus called up the nymphs and satyrs, the madwomen and bull-roarers and wild swine, and called off the orgy, told them he wasn’t in an orgy mood, that he felt stiff and achy and blue and wanted to be alone. To the last orgiast, they told him that a good orgy was exactly what he needed to restore his spirits—enjoy a skin of good wine, strip naked, feel the oil trickle down his thighs, feel the heat of golden down-covered young women writhing upon and around and under him moaning and crying out his name, their proud young breasts, their taut brown bellies, their limber shanks, their—no thanks, he said, he’d just stay home and work the crossword with his wife, Ariadne.

He returned the olive oil to the store, and the manager, a solemn fellow with a nose like a chisel, said, “It didn’t feel right? Too slick? You want something with more texture, like a basil vinaigrette or honey mustard? Myself, I find that mustard irritates the privates, but maybe you’re into that, I don’t know. You interested in molasses? Or we have this new strawberry body jam.” The leer in the man’s voice seemed dreary and disgusting.

He drove slowly home, through the leafy suburbs of Boeotia. A flock of dark birds poured out of a poplar tree, skimmed the ground, and wheeled, their undersides flashing brilliant silver, like a burst of rockets.

Ariadne had fixed poached grouper for supper, not his favorite, and the potatoes were burnt and covered with a cream sauce. And there was a papyrus salad, rather dry to the palate. Dionysus put down his fork and reached for the wine. Ariadne leaned across the fish and took his hand, her eyes large with compassion. “Dio, we need to talk about your drinking,” she said.

Dionysus rolled his eyes. “Look,” he said, “I’m the god of wine, okay? I’m not the god of iced tea. I am the god of revelry, a crucial element of the fertility process. The dancing and drinking and whooping and wahooing is what makes the wheat grow, babes. That’s what gives us the corn crop. Why am I telling you this? You know this.”

Nonetheless, she said, she was concerned about his health. She had read an article that said most people drink to build up self-confidence and compensate for low self-esteem. She thought he needed to see someone.

“I have no lack of self-esteem!” he cried. “I’m a god!”

“Are you?”

“Of course I am! What do you mean, are you? What do you mean by that? Of course I’m a god.” Dionysus leaned forward. “Aren’t I?”

“You’re fifty,” she said. “To me, fifty spells m-o-r-t-a-l.”

He held out his hands. “I’m the same beautiful guy with the same flowing locks as when you married me. Look.” And he touched his hair, and it was still limp. Was he using the wrong conditioner?

“Drinking too much wine is hard on your hair, honey. And it causes loss of memory. And it makes you flatulent,” she said.

He looked at her, confused. Memory loss! What memory loss was she referring to? When?

“You’re still my dreamboat,” she said. “But grow up. And get help.”

The next morning, three satyrs knocked on his door and announced that they had gone ahead with the orgy on their own, it had been va-va-va-voom zing-zing-zing all night and now the orgy had recessed for vomiting and baths and would resume at ten-thirty with a wild-boar brunch. They cried, “Sixteen young virgins are arriving from Macedonia, the tenderest and prettiest ones! Fresh as dewdrops on spring roses! Shy and freckled and peach-soft skin! Big brown eyes and long black hair! Or blonde! Take your pick!” Despite the long night of partying, they hopped around on their hairy legs, their goat feet tapping, their eyes burning diamond-bright, their long ears twitching. Satyrs know no sexual restraint except that imposed by their natural cowardice—they are terrified of confrontation, darkness, nonelective surgery, loud noises, and long-term commitments; but once liquored up, they can go for days, humping like bunnies. Dionysus winced at the odor of their musk. “Look. Guys—short-term, I’d love to join you, but I got to think long-term now. I’ve got a mortality problem I’ve got to deal with.”

That morning, he flew to Mount Olympus to visit Zeus, and instead of forty minutes, the trip took four hours; Air Parnassus bumped him off the first flight—“I’m a god!” he cried, but the woman pointed out that his deity card had expired the day before and put him on standby, and finally he got the last available seat on the four-fifteen, a middle seat in the last row, next to a fat man who perspired heavily and who asked him what line of work he was in. “Wine,” said Dionysus. “Oh,” said the fat man, “that’s a coincidence. I’m in the beer business.” He seemed to think that beer and wine were closely allied, like cheese and crackers, or philosophy and philately. Dionysus took a cab to the temple, where Zeus kept him waiting another hour. When Dionysus finally was ushered into the sacred office, Zeus—his own dad!—shook his hand stiffly, smiled officially, and said, “I’ve decided to make a change. Latromis is going to become the god of wine, and you’re going to be the chairman of wine. He’ll do the revels and orgies and lie around with the nubile young women and you can form a wine board, organize wine programs, formulate wine goals, that sort of thing. Maximize wine. Whatever. And by the way, congratulations on turning fifty. I meant to send a card, but anyway, here’s your birthday presents.” He pointed toward a marble pedestal.

There was a sack of fruit such as you’d buy in a supermarket, and a pound of blue cheese, and a T-shirt with a picture of a cow saying “Fly Me to the Moon,” and a photograph of Zeus in a silver frame, signed, “Yours sincerely, Zeus,” as if Dionysus were only a fan.

“Dad,” he said. “Why am I fifty? Why did my divinity expire? You never told me this would happen.”

Zeus feigned surprise. “You? What are you talking about? You still look pretty darned divine to me!” he said, chuckling in a dry, insincere way as he steered Dionysus to the door. “But if you think there’s a problem, I’ll look into it. First thing next week. I’ll get back to you,” he said. “Bye!”

It was a bad time for a guy who had been a god, now suddenly mortified, degraded, pitied, and abandoned, and Dionysus thought he would drop in at the orgy and see how it was going. It was going wonderfully! An all-girl band played in the nude, including a fabulous ram’s-hornist and a blues harpist who plucked handfuls of strings and cried “Oh yes! yes!,” and a naked lady poet leaped around and shouted at Dionysus—O your body my body somebody and the liquid light leaping into the howling arroyos of the boyish soul, you yoyo!—and Janis Idol the pop star and blonde strumpet was lurking in the corner of the room, throwing smoldering looks over her shoulder, and nubility was in full flower and pliancy and suppleness and some women are meant to be bare-breasted, that’s all, and a young virgin named Grace Huggins turned out to be not only supple and pliant and delicious but also a tremendous Ping-Pong player, and after long slow dizzying triumphant love she beat him two out of three games, her sarcastic young breasts bouncing, faking him out, as her topspin serve rocketed off the table and her backhand spinners hooked the corners and her slop shots handcuffed him with their little dips and flutters, and then more love, and some wine, and love again, and she looked up at him dreamily and said, “Oh wow,” and her simple sincere Oh wow was what cured his blues. To make love and hear a woman say “Oh wow”—it was all a fifty-year-old needed, to know that he was still impressive. “I love when you look over your left shoulder like that,” she whispered. Dionysus said, “Thanks, babe,” and reached for a glass and drank it down, and the next he knew, she was gone, the afternoon sun blazed down, he was crawling buck-naked through a cornfield with the glass in his hand, his head felt like a lag bolt was screwed in the side of it, and overhead, immense black buzzards slowly circled, shrieking. Something dangled from his mouth that felt like the tail of a small rodent. Just the same, he felt no regret. Her Oh wow was worth it. He slumped down in the dirt and the sharp stones, his poor old body hurting, his back raked with scratches, his lips dry and crusty, the taste of sorrow in his mouth—and yet, he thought…and yet. Oh wow.

When he dragged himself home, Ariadne took one look and gave him an ultimatum: “Get help or get out.”

He tried to explain. “Life is a celebration,” he whispered, his cracked lips hurting. “In order to grow, we need to enjoy who we are. In order to get to tomorrow, we have to fully enjoy today.”

“Tell it to a therapist,” she said.

Theros, the Muse of caring, ran a treatment program on Mount Aesculapius especially for gods, demigods, and ex-gods, and when Dionysus walked in and sat down on her couch, she said, “I’m not surprised one bit to see you. Do you want to know why?”

He did not. He was tired of the knowingness of women.

Theros had a tight mouth and big legs. She crossed them, licked her lips, and opened her notebook. She said, “Tell me about your parents.”

“You know about my parents,” he said. “Dad was God, of course. Zeus. Fell in love with Mom and then his wife Hera got jealous and came to Mom in disguise and said, Hey, congratulations, but if you want a really good time, tell him to bring his thunderbolts, it’s a real charge! So Mom did, and it was too much—she burst into flames. But Dad snatched me up from her burning body—out of the ashes—and sewed me up in his thigh and I spent my prenatal period there, next to his gonads.

“My nurse was Mom’s sister Ino, who Hera drove mad so Ino ran around in a frenzy, spit dripping from her lips, a terrible babysitter, and she jumped off a cliff into the sea. Then Hera had me torn into shreds and boiled in a cauldron. I was rescued by my grandma, but death and destruction made a big impression on me. Maybe that’s why I invented wine, as an escape from the violent disapproval of my father’s wife. I don’t know. I often have dreams in which I have been locked in a chest with my mother and put out to sea and we drift for months, then she dies. I lie in the dark, starving, mad, next to her dead body, rolling on the ocean waves, and then I am found by kindly fisher folk and brought to a green island paradise where I run naked in the woods, and one day, wild swine with bloodstained tusks and tiny red eyes come charging at me through the tall booji grass and I run and run and run, panic-stricken, and fall off the edge of the mile-high cliff and wake up soaked with sweat, trembling, the sheet wound around my neck.”

“What kind of chest?”

“You know. A sort of trunk,” he said.

She squinted and pursed her lips. “With drawers?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“Like a cabinet or cupboard?”

“No, I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

“Why don’t you know?”

This was the maddening thing about Theros, he discovered: you told her a great story and she got wrapped up in one dumb little detail, like when you described your first orgy, even though the whole point of the story was mindless ecstatic sex, she leaned forward, pencil in hand, and said, “Let’s go back to those little smoked-herring sandwiches. Why herring? And why curried herring?” until you groaned with frustration, remembering that pile of glistening naked young bodies, that ocean of passion, and she said, “And those celery sticks with cream-cheese spread in them. Were there pimentos in those, too?” As a therapist, she was an awful bore.

“As I understand wild revelry, it is a celebration of life,” Dionysus told Theros, patiently. “Before we can create new life, we need to enjoy the life we have and to defeat sullenness and lethargy and depression, the withering of the spirit. So we take our treasure and spend it lavishly, inspiring ourselves with happiness, we get drunk, we sing, we fling food at each other, and the next week the fields grow rich, fertilized by wild song, and the grain outlasts the heat and drought of the Dog Star, and the land pours out a bounty of wheat and corn. And from this, we make more beer and whiskey.”

“You’re avoiding mentioning the celery sticks,” she said. “Why?”

Dionysus wearied of therapy. His spirit sank every day as the appointment approached. He hated sitting in that dim dry room and trying to be a patient, trying to feel needy, when, in fact, his life seemed to him powerful, thrusting forward, drawn by a powerful wind. So one day he quit. “I don’t have you down for next week,” she said. “Good,” he replied. He kissed her goodbye on the lips, a lingering kiss to give her something to think about.

Instead of therapy, he tried a new brand of bran flakes, which included flecks of birch boughs. He did push-ups and he climbed chairs. His hair improved slightly, when he switched to a shampoo with extra oil to compensate for not attending orgies.

And he cut down on wine, limiting himself to only the best varieties and only on special occasions. No more glugging, just sipping. And no more young Macedonian women.

It was a dreary business, middle age. He missed those nymphs, doggone it, and even the satyrs with their hairy legs and odor of rut. Say what you will, they are the right sort of disreputable people, and when you drape your arm around them and all sing “Waltz Me Around Again, Willie,” those nymphs and satyrs sing the dirtiest verses loud, no sheepish looks as if Mom might be watching, they let the lust and gluttony and hairy grunting beast of bad taste hang out all the way, and now, as world chairman of wine, he found himself more and more among people with the emotional range of Lucite, earnest men indistinguishable from other earnest men, serious women who shrank from any sort of playfulness, people who said How pleasant to see you when there was not a crumb of pleasure within a hundred feet. He had lived thousands and thousands of years, but it wasn’t until he reached the age of fifty that he realized how desolate life could be.

“How are you?” Ariadne asked him.

“I am fine,” he said.

“We’re having the Whipples over tonight,” she said. “And the Snaffles. And Jim and Judy Woofle.” Dreadful people, all of them, people who could bore the shoes right off you. Their idea of a big time was to sit around and complain about schools and traffic congestion. “Good,” he said, “I’m looking forward to it. That’ll be real fun.” In reduced circumstances, one must show generosity and elegance of spirit, he knew. He tried to smile. He stared out the window. Long stone houses lay half-hidden back among the olive and fruit trees across the sweep of clipped sward, and he could see sunlight flickering on distant pools in which he had swum at midnight, naked, the pool crowded with happy women splashing and laughing—there had never been a bad party for him—always there had been boring men, yes, with voices like handsaws, but the young women turned instinctively toward him when he rose dripping from the pool and the party rose to a higher pitch and the tide of music and laughter rose and carried the celebrants off the stony shoals of life and career and family, even sometimes the boring men, and for all the parties he had enjoyed, he wanted more, many many more.

He trudged into his study and plopped down at the desk. Piles of work lay there, a sheaf of papers relating to the upcoming conference on Meeting the Wine Needs of the Nineties and a sixteen-page speech on "Promoting the Total Wine Experience” that he himself must stand at a dais and deliver the following day, a real stink bomb. There was a stack of bills, from the dentist, the phone company, the chiropractor, and a curt reminder that he owed four hundred drachmas for a shipment of olive oil.

Dionysus picked up his pen. “Dear Hatchet Face,” he wrote in a bold hand. “You have some nerve demanding payment for a jar of rancid oil that made me smell like an aging buffalo and that had so much grit in it as to make concupiscence an uphill climb.”

He balled the page up and flung it toward the waste-basket and cried out as the ball fell short. After thousands and thousands of years without pain of any sort, now, at the age of fifty, he had a backache.