The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms

Society became split. Pythagoras and his Orphist followers broke away. They fled Greece and settled in the ancient city of Crotone, southern Italy, where they could live in relative safety from their now sworn enemies within the old order.

They really should have stuck to mathematics. Many of Pythagoras’s followers were forced to take vows of silence and to observe bizarre customs, which included the outlawing of beans. Initially, the word bean was banned. Later, all verbal communication was forbidden, apart from within the higher order.

Birds, particularly male swallows, were never allowed in any house.

Any dropped objects, particularly food, were never to be picked up. This, they believed, was bad luck. They would instead invite Pythagoras’s favorite hound, Braco, into the dining hall after each meal, to clean the floor of any tidbits. During thunderstorms, one’s feet had to remain on the ground. Any imprint of the body on bedclothes had to be smoothed out.

The pursuing zealots tracked down the heretic to his enclave in Crotone. They were feeling murderous, but in a way that only a lynch mob of very understanding, tolerant religious fundamentalists can be.

Some they slaughtered within the city walls, and they left some others castrated in the dusty streets. Then they chased Pythagoras and the rest out of Crotone. When the castrated victims rediscovered their vocal cords, Pythagoras was well out of town and making his escape. He came to, of all places, a bean field, which he had to cross in order to survive. His remaining trickle of fickle followers trampled through the crop; only Pythagoras had the conviction not to cross, not to make a Faustian pact with the diabolical bean.

And so he was cut down at the edge of the bean field, screaming anti-legume propaganda until his last breath. And THAT was the end of one of the greatest mathematical brains and maddest men the world had ever known.

* * *

It was Drago’s obsession with Pythagoras which eventually tipped him into his very own deep-trenched psychosis.

There were those locals who would suggest that in order for Drago to arrive at the front doors of madness, the journey need be neither long nor arduous. It was less a prolonged and tortured ride, and more a popping around the corner for a pint of milk. The effects on his family (and the unsuspecting world), however, would be catastrophic.

* * *

Drago, although fully versed in the hypotheses of Pythagoras, refused to subscribe to any of his teachings. He started to eat beans with every meal.

Before long, he would have bouts of eating ONLY beans, and beans of every breed. He became prolifically flatulent, often attempting traditional folk tunes with his emissions. Pythagoras became his nemesis, his Professor Moriarty.

Drago’s physical health began to deteriorate. His face was gaunt and shadowy. He became a bean expert, and grew beans in any spare patch of land or any darkened cupboard.

The vitamin deficiency from his bean-only intake progressed; previous eccentricities were magnified and new ones multiplied by his physical decline. His colleagues, who still had enormous respect for the man, tried to intervene, but the madness was taking over his behavior. He would be found carrying out more of the very acts against which Pythagoras had rebelled.

For example, during a thunderstorm, Drago would be found not only NOT touching the ground, but climbing trees or, worse, sitting on the roof of the house with his arms wrapped around his knees, his chin resting on them. He refused to use bedsheets, for fear of rising with them uncrumpled. He left beans in every room. He laid them out in a circle around the house and wore them on strings around his neck and wrists.

Furthermore, when he was at the dinner table, he would clumsily, but purposefully, knock food and utensils onto the floor, and slowly pick them up with a wide grin.

Johan’s mother, Elena, consulted her closest friends and then a doctor. She was concerned, more so when he started to leave all the windows open and, with bread and seeds, enticed into their house birds of every genus.

At school, meanwhile, any kind of quiet was a sign to Drago that his pupils were being tempted into a Pythagorean vow of silence. One member of the class always had to be talking, humming, whistling, or singing. Drago did not sleep night after night for fear of silence.

After many such sleepless nights, Drago began talking to himself on the way to school and around the grounds. This was simply not tolerable, so the headmaster took action. He successfully packaged the move as offering Drago a sabbatical to further his anti-Pythagorean studies. He was even afforded a meager pension, sold to him as a “study wage.”

For this, the Thoms family was eternally grateful, for during his sabbatical, Drago’s behavior was at least predictable.

So what if they had to tolerate swallows (and other hungry birds) in the house? Clarence, the ginger tomcat, was delighted, until, having won many battles, he lost the war. He was slung out on his furry ear for helping himself to one too many feathery enemies.

Because their child had left home, Elena could enjoy bedclothes in the relative sanity of a spare room. She and Drago did remain sexually active, though. Drago’s dedication to his research strangely concentrated his libidinal reserves, which were thrust upon and into an initially disturbed Elena. They regressed into humping like street dogs. Drago considered employing a cheap pianist to prevent a lack of noise.

The name Pythagoras was banned from the household, referred to only in Macbeth fashion, as “the Greek.”

Elena eventually embraced the new Drago, especially as much of his attention was now directed toward her. How many of her friends could boast of exploits such as theirs?

“The older the violin, the sweeter the music,” Drago would claim.

Having the house to themselves afforded them luxuries in their sexual deeds. Having her anal area dive-bombed by wild birds searching for crumbs while she fellated Drago was, however, a bridge too far.

Well, at least, at first.

* * *

So when, in June 1913, a letter arrived at the ancient University of Sarajevo addressed to Johan Thoms, it urged the recipient to consider making a small sacrifice for the greater familial good.

Johan considered bar work (he had made plenty of contacts from his time spent on the other side), laboring (but he was too uncoordinated to be of much use, those skinny matchstick legs and small feet), but it would really be more a question of what he could find.

He then recalled a summer over a decade before, when a wealthy young nobleman offered help of any kind should he or his family ever require it. He was still owed by the crazed, philandering, bug-eyed, buggering count whose buck had once almost taken the young lad’s eye and his life. It was time for Count Sodom to make good on his promise. Johan went to his old oak study desk, pulled out a yellowed notebook, and flicked through it. He came to a page written in a childish scrawl, very much that of a seven-year-old. Johan Thoms then took out his best writing paper, pen, and inkpot and started to write:

Dear Count,

I hope you may remember me . . .

Four (#ulink_e76e7f43-e0cd-5580-a48e-933466b78b77)

The Kama Sutra, Ganika, and Russian Vampires (#ulink_e76e7f43-e0cd-5580-a48e-933466b78b77)

Take the Kama Sutra. How many people died from the Kama Sutra, as opposed to the Bible? Who wins?

—Frank Zappa

June 9, 1913

After he had written his note, Johan Thoms spent the next part of the searing June day that followed reading and rereading a rare copy of the Kama Sutra, one of the first ever published in English, part of a trilogy. He had procured the collection by a stroke of luck. The tutor who had lent it to him lost his job at the college for exposing himself to a group of visiting nuns from County Cork. The professor fled the university in shame before Johan could return the books.

The books were to become Johan’s lifelong companions, to accompany him throughout his adventures as he traversed the continent and zigzagged his way through a self-induced mayhem. The trilogy (along with a number of other objects collected around this time) would then become the focus for his final whirlpool of psychosis. But I am rushing ahead.

The edition was a beauty, printed on thick paper. Its white vellum binding, trimmed with gold, boasted the original extended title:

The Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana

Translated from the Sanscrit

In Seven Parts, with Preface, Introduction and Concluding Remarks

The inside cover offered further intrigue and mystery:

Cosmopoli: 1883; for the Kama Shastra Society of London and Benares, and for private circulation only

(Bizarrely, Vatsyayana always claimed that he was celibate.)

The other books Johan had inherited from his nun-loving mentor bore equally intriguing titles.

Ananga-Ranga and the Hindu Art of Love