IO.

Juno is the first lady of Olympus and the G.o.ddess 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 ma.s.s 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 G.o.d 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese car, especially one which 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 G.o.ds and wears a winged cap and wing-tip 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.

HERO AND LEANDER.

Leander was a youth from Santa Monica, and Hero lived many miles away in Laurel Canyon, where she was a priestess of Venus, the G.o.ddess 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 AND ACTAEON.

Diana is the virgin (with men, anyway) G.o.ddess 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 rest room for women workers with couches where they could lie down if they were having their periods. Eventually he was hounded into bankruptcy.

PYGMALION.

Pygmalion was a fashion photographer who was h.o.m.os.e.xual 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 he 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 G.o.ddess, 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 AND EURYDICE.

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 ca.s.settes. 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 a.s.sociating with reputed members of organized-crime families. But Orpheus couldn't resist taking a peek, and it ruined their marriage.

PENELOPE'S SUITORS

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 AND NARCISSUS.

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 a.s.sistant at Lorimar and he's trying to make it as a male model.

PYRAMUS AND THISBE.

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 s.e.x 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 f.u.c.k 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 st.i.tch the cloth of human destiny into slacks and have the cuffs altered to determine man's lifespan-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.

PLUTO AND PROSERPINE.

Proserpine was the beautiful daughter of Ceres, G.o.ddess 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 h.e.l.l 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.

CUPID AND PSYCHE.

The myth of Cupid and Psyche is a difficult myth to understand. Psyche was a beautiful young girl whom the G.o.d 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 a.n.a.lysis with a Freudian psychiatrist who needs words like "psyche" to explain vague things he probably shouldn't be fooling around with anyway.

VENUS AND ADONIS.

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 s.e.xual needs.

Tune In, Turn On,

Go to the Office.

Late on Monday.

Every generation finds the drug it needs. The 1950s man, the corporate bevel gear, got silly on his dry martinis. The idiot hippie babbling in his pad had psychedelics to make it all mystic and smart. The wimps of the seventies took cocaine for their climb to the top. And the cold, selfish children of 1985 think Ecstasy will make them loved and loving. It's all pet food. Drugs are a one-man birthday party. You don't get any presents you didn't bring. Personally, I haven't taken a new drug in fifteen years. The mature adult-balanced, reasonable, facing the world and the self with a steady eye-doesn't need drugs. Except for one of those martinis every now and then or three or five of them and a line of blow if he's going out dancing later and some champagne and a joint and a fistful of Tylenol, b.l.o.o.d.y Marys, Valium, and . . . what the h.e.l.l, who's got the Ecstasy?

Practically everybody, as it turns out. "You have incredible insights," said a magazine editor. "Everybody you're with, you just bond," said a jewelry designer. "Oh, gosh, tee-hee-hee-hee-hee," said an Off-Broadway actress. "Your defenses melt," said somebody else. I got mine from a Manhattan businessman. He and I, a young woman of our acquaintance, and a Texan journalist took it together.

Another half-dozen people came by that night, and-here's a friendly point about the drug-I cannot tell you which if any of them was high. With one exception. My friend L. brought an earnest, twerpy date who was flat uncomfortable seeing WASPy layabouts blasted on drugs in early middle age. He was wearing a dago sport coat with wedges of cheddar cheese in the shoulder pads and a pattern like bad TV reception. I definitely didn't bond to him and would have needed the aesthetics of epoxy cement to do so. He kept looking like he was trying to remember the poison-control phone number and left early.

Anyway, Ecstasy came in a largish plain pill. It was supposed to be stuff from the pre-illegal days but still looked, to this retired Aquarian, like it had been hand-made on a home tabbing machine. The dosage was ... forget it. I recall long, lying discussions about mgs and mics in the days when I thought I had a Ph.D. in street pharmacology. But dope comes in just two dosages: too much and not enough. What we took fell in that general range-better than staying up late to watch David Letterman alone and not so good the police had to raid us.

But first you sit around for half an hour or forty-five minutes. Then there's a sort of resigned sigh in the brain. "Yes," you tell it, "I've been tampering with your synapses again. Try to think of it as anger or l.u.s.t. These, too, cause chemical changes in the cerebral cortex and alter-"

"Oh, shut up," says Mr. Brain.

Then the Supreme Body Court starts deliberating: "Are we going to love this thing or have cardiac arrest? We need to s.h.i.t, sleep, throw up, dance. Nope. Just kidding. None of those things, only a big feeling. Not euphoria exactly, not epiphany, just a great big good feeling."

"Can it," says Mr. Brain.

"Ahhh," says the Manhattan businessman.

"Whew," says the Texan journalist.

"Hmmm," says the young woman.

I say, "f.u.c.k! This isn't bad at all."

I had to be very serious with the door locks, letting people in. These were a pretty complicated set of k.n.o.bs and chains and other such technical devices but not beyond the abilities of a bright fellow like myself welcoming all these good people into a swell place like mine.

Which is something of a drug-induced exaggeration. I mean, not about the people, they're perfectly good. But I have this pied a terre in New York, or pied a dirt is more like it. This is a big chunk of raw loft s.p.a.ce looking as only New York raw loft s.p.a.ce can look-like the planet Neptune decorated by wild hogs. Take LSD in here and all bets are off. You'd wind up in Winter Park, Florida, begging geriatric old Mom and Dad to take you to a Tough Love workshop. But on Ecstasy, the dump turned into party spot central, a big happy room where you could put your cigarettes out right on the floor and set your drink down anywhere and not leave gla.s.s rings on the Hepplewhite chiffonier. What a bizarre feeling to be palpably glad that you don't have a Hepplewhite chiffonier. And I don't even know what a chiffonier is.

I don't think much has been written about "Ecstasy taste." But even the twerp in the sportcoat was looking nice. Surely he was a fine person at heart, just uneasy because his Armani jacket couldn't get Channel 7. Our LP selections ran to early Ry Cooder and The Best of Joan Baez-piped-in elevator melodies for the hip. Music's the food of love. But what's Muzak the food of? Love drugs, I guess. Typical bachelor, I'd laid out a deplorable buffet of loose baloney slices, graham crackers, and jalapeno cheese. We didn't touch this, so we hadn't completely lost our senses. (A German pharmaceutical company originally patented Ecstasy as an appet.i.te suppressant, and they had that right.) Still, there was a lot of misplaced admiration for my efforts. Admiration seemed to be running around unfettered generally.

You get these waves of buoyant jollity. Also, sometimes, you get sick. The young woman did. She weighs a hundred pounds and took the same pill as the guys. We're six inches taller and none of us is going to be asked to pose for Calvin Klein underwear ads. About an hour after the drug took effect she broke out in a cold sweat. Her heart raced. She felt nauseated. This lasted ten minutes. The rest of us just perspired, worked our jaws a bit, drank stacks of beer, and p.i.s.sed every three seconds.

We sat talking like teenagers, that is, volubly and at length about nothing that can be remembered, curled on our chairs, smiling, rocking slightly, feeling wholesome and completely swell. "Are you okay now?" I asked the young woman. "Sure," she said, "I feel great. I'm having a good time. I like being with these people. But"-she turned that eye of inexorable female preserver-of-the-species logic on me-"I always have a good time. I always like being with these people. So I'm not sure I get the point."

And that's it. That's all that happens. You feel real good.

What is this human need to make fun of something else-profound, important, illegal? According to an overinformative article in New York magazine (May 20, 1985), Ecstasy is 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, an opposite isomer (or mirror image) of the active molecule in some hallucinogens. Chemically it's similar to mescaline and, get this, the nasal decongestant Sudafed. I'd say the effect about splits the difference. To me it felt like a very sophisticated, extremely well-buffered speed. You get the glow without the jitters (or the energy to write term papers). Once any discomforts have pa.s.sed, the only bad parts of the buzz are a mad pa.s.sion for cigarettes and that grimy feeling on the skin common to many drugs. There's no difficulty "maintaining." If Delta Force banged on your door you'd be able to calmly explain that the PLO terrorists live upstairs in 5B, not at your house. Though you might also thank the commanding officer for being who he is and tell him his uniform is cute.

I suppose you could freak out if you really tried. In the New York article, Dr. Ronald Siegal, a pharmacologist at UCLA, says, "We had a psychotherapist who took it, disappeared, and turned up a week later directing traffic." Finally found a meaningful career, I'd say.

On the other hand, there have been claims that Ecstasy provides "instant psychoa.n.a.lysis." In a Life magazine article, "The Trouble with Ecstasy" (August 1985), an unnamed psychologist says, "A five-hour session can be equivalent to five months of regular therapy. It could put people like me out of business." Probably a good idea to put people like him out of business, but I don't see what that has to do with drugs.

What about insights? People keep telling me they had insights, "real insights that really stick with you." But they'll never tell me what those insights were. Are we talking about high-quality insights like the second law of thermodynamics or the Pythagorean theorem? Or are we talking about "I finally realized that, deep down inside, I'm me"? n.o.body will say. Myself, I didn't come up with a unified field theory or anything.

To really enjoy drugs you've got to want to get out of where you are. But there are some wheres that are harder to get out of than others. This is the drug-taking problem for adults. Teenage weltschmerz is easy to escape. But what drug will get a grown-up out of, for instance, debt?