The Great and Calamitous Tale of Johan Thoms

“I am sure the dean would be quite chuffed about that.”

“I am not indulging that old rotter. And at his age, I am sure he would have certain . . . problems.”

“Like an oyster in a keyhole.”

“You mean like playing billiards with a rope.”

They rolled around in fits of giggles.

The early summer sun warmed their young faces and started to turn them an even tan.

Three girls passed within close enough range for their scent of new white soap and the final drops from a dewberry perfume bottle to pique the boys’ olfactory nerves. Then it was gone, and impossible to recapture. But that was their intention, of course, and far more romantic than new perfume and old soap. Johan swept blades of freshly cut grass from his sun-faded dress shoe to make his gawping more subtle. For that is what they wanted. Subtle was important. Politely doffing the cap to Aphrodite.

“It is a good job I don’t believe in heaven, William my friend, because acquainting with you leaves me not a cat in hell’s chance.”

“By George, you believe in heaven all right. It was in that coffeehouse five minutes ago, still in your nostrils right now. And within a breadth of a cat’s cock hair of you five seconds ago. So do not give me that twaddle! They love it. Look at them, and acting as if they had just finished choir practice.”

Billy stared at the woman, daydreaming, for more than a few seconds.

“Stop right now!” he said. “I must think of something else before I go crazy and they drag me off to the Old Pajama Club to be straitjacketed, drip-fed bromide, and cold-showered all damned summer.”

They both knew that Johan was by no means as promiscuous as his pal. It was not for the lack of opportunity, it was for the lack of opportunism. Billy was making the most of his psychiatric studies in a very practical way. He could pick out a girl’s desires and needs. He read her body language, and learned which buttons to press in order to achieve his wicked, wicked goal.

Johan, on the other hand, from his studies, knew the practicality of the past participle of “to wiggle” in Italian. He knew that the title Our Mutual Friend was an illogical use of English; that Our Friend in Common was grammatically correct; and that Dickens had indeed made this error on purpose. He knew it was possible to have three consecutive e’s in the same word in French (La femme était créée pour servir l’homme) and the Time-Manner-Place rule in German (Ich bin um neun Uhr mit dem Zug nach Halle gefahren).

Billy knew which chemicals a girl’s brain would release to make her want whoever or whatever had given her the pleasure.

“It’s called oxytocin, Thoms. A pituitary hormone stimulates uterine muscle contractions. The hormone of love, the sugarcoating the ladies need to reproduce. Oxytocin is Darwinism at work. The desire for intercourse is the genius of genus. I heard that in a lecture yesterday. It’s been oxytocin that has led us as humans to do it face-to-face for forty thousand years. You know, the only other creature on the planet to do it in the same manner is the bonobo chimp. Adorable little blighter lives in the Congo, apparently, Johan. Did you know that?”

“I am all ears.”

“Ha! A bit like the bonobo chimp, then,” Bill said. “Where would you be without me, old chap? Hmm? Ignorant about chimps, for one!”

And so they rambled on as another sublime afternoon wound to a close. The sun disappeared behind the wondrous stone palace that was the dean’s house. Billy tapped Johan on the shoulder and proposed:

“Come on, let’s go have a martini. The burlesque girls start at midnight. Let’s get drunk first. How about a sweaty flagon of self-respect for me and a shot of dignity for your good self?”

“It’s a deal.”

They marched off to cause trouble with total malice aforethought, discussing Chaucer and the genius genesis of the word fuck.

* * *

William Atticus Forsythe Cartwright was a strapping six-foot-three man mountain in his bare bear feet. Long wavy hair rested on his broad shoulders. He sported, as usual, a crisp white linen shirt, top button undone, and a claret tie of subtle pattern and (subliminally Freudian) large, fat knot, which just kept his shirt collar from informality. When shirtless, he was identifiable by a tattoo on his thighlike left biceps: a swooping swallow with Billy’s name beneath it reminded him of the impetuous nature of youth in general and, more specifically, his own.

It was a short walk of twenty minutes from the university quadrangle along the Appel Quay by the gushing Miljacka to their favorite bar in the old town of Bascarsija, the “marketplace.” Thirty minutes after entering the area, they were still cutting a swath through its maze, famed for the spiced aromas emanating from ovens stuffed with tray after tray of cevapcici, the local staple of minced beef, potato, and onion wrapped in thick dough. It seemed that Bascarsija was made up of a hundred back alleys, yet was strangely ordered. Each nook and ginnel housed a particular trade, be it the butcher, the antiquarian bookseller (saffah), or the dealer in copper, wood, fruit, Turkish tobacco hookah pipes, cowbells, coffee shops, shoes, meats, rugs (kilims) from Persia, Moorish fezzes or apotropaic jewelry, to ward off evil spirits.

They walked through the bohemian medieval backstreets, soaking in the incongruous backdrop of evening prayer as smoke filled the charmed alleys. It was on a similar evening not many weeks before this (Johan was mid–Dorian Gray) when Bill Cartwright had first introduced his good friend to la fée verte, the green fairy. We all have our favorite vice, which can often be the very thing we should, on all accounts, avoid. The mirth we find may have a quite devilish draw, likely to increase our intake and thereby the chances of ultimate destruction; but she is as alluring as a cruel princess. Johan’s poison proved to be the particularly malicious absinthe.

Their destination now was the Old Sultan’s Palace, one of the oldest buildings in the city, dating back to the 1500s. Perched on the hills to the east, and of a white Moorish design, it seemed to come straight out of The Thief of Bagdad. Sunset gave it an air of the regal, of high society. However, it showed its true colors at about eight in the morning, when the debris and detritus of the night littered its wonderful halls and lush gardens. Prostitutes, clients, deserters, deadbeats, drunks, lesbians, fiends, crazies, vagrants, homosexuals, opium addicts, soldiers, vampires, suicide cases, police chiefs, gamblers, and weirdos. Squadrons of sozzled barbarians. The obese, fantasists, elitists, illusionists, and delusionists. Cheats, frauds, judges, mentals, judgmentals, and fiddlers. The grim of mind and the loose of faculty. The pompous and the snaggletoothed, the bothersome and the prejudiced. All were there.

After a wait of no more than five minutes at the edge of Bascarsija, an omnibus picked the boys up and started its trundle down the boulevard. It was sticky and stinky in the bus, with only standing room for newcomers. It spewed them out at the top of the hill.

The light was fading as the lads approached the Old Sultan’s Palace. The Old Sultan of Byzantium was rumored to have been an ally of Kubla Khan himself. Centuries before, he had positioned his harem of two hundred or more nubile women here. Back in 1575, by order of the Sultan (buyurultus), the girls lived only with the city’s eunuchs, the best physician in the land, and His Highness himself. Here, he decreed his own, albeit slightly less grandiose, Xanadu.

“Pah! It was just a fad and a fashion among these sultan chaps. Bloody show-offs,” Bill said.

* * *

They walked along the stony driveway up to the mansion. Johan felt they were entering a bygone age, that time was standing still for them, as it does when one is nineteen. The clatter of the loose stones under their Oxford brogues invited them into a different world, and offered the promise of being an adult.

This was their time, for this was (metaphorically) the Saturday lunchtime of their youth. They cast no shadow.

That evening, the Old Sultan’s Palace heaved under a weighty Moorish mystery. Weird attracted exquisite in a perpetual wave of self-fueling cosines and logarithms. The palace remains to this day a venue of staggering beauty, full of time-slip corridors, medieval arches, and cul-de-sacs where amazed visitors’ pocket watches stop.

They were drawn to the yellow lights through the grandiose Persian arches on the rear lawn. An energy emanated from there, and given the nature of energies, archways, and lights, boys are duty bound to inspect.

Billy whittled on half philosophically, half rhetorically, in Johan’s ear.

“But, Thoms, old bean. If a man says something in a forest, and a woman is not there to hear it, is he still wrong?”

No answer.

On the other side of the arch, a party was in full flow. Black ties and white tuxedos, white and black evening dresses, and waiters. Johan tried to put his finger on the energy as they entered the fray.

“Keep your pecker up.”

“Keep YOUR pecker out.”

This was their routine as they telepathically divided to conquer.

Johan heard few Bosnian or even European accents. Most of the party-goers, he realized, were Americans. There seemed to be something distinct about this party, something which he could not quite identify. Was it their New World energy, with their modern haircuts, their lack of walrus mustaches and beards?

Perhaps it was the more modern music or a strange dance he had never seen before. Or was it the stench of wealth which pervaded the air?

Or was it . . . Holy Jesus . . . was it the most absolute beauty with whom he found himself faced?

Seconds of silence ticked by. If absolute zero is minus 273 degrees Celsius, then this was an absolute silence. The absolute of that silence was equaled only by the absolute of the blackness in her eyes.

Her lips were a scarlet sofa in an ivory palace.

Johan’s embarrassing lack of words was broken by the familiar voice of Professor Tiberius Novac. The rest of the world had continued while Johan had disappeared into his cataleptic trance. Worse than that, the woman had simply stared at this fool.

He sort of heard the prof’s words, nudging the stem of his cerebral cortex.

“Johan Thoms! My boy! What an absolute pleasure! What brings you to a party for the American ambassador? Do you know him, my boy? You ARE a dark horse, aren’t you!” A gentle tap to the shin from the outside of his tutor’s well-polished dress shoe was not enough. The dusky beauty suppressed a laugh.

“But who is SHE?” blurted Johan, totally forgetting his place, stumbling in and out of his body.