Prose
Sagittarius
I should have known that things would never change, that it would never be any different. What with the earth moving beneath my feet during the weekend of our first meeting. One doesn't have to be a Zeus to recognize the engulfing and implacable doom associated with meeting up with a Ganymede or Narcissus or Chrysippus or, as in my case, a comparable Sagittarius adolescent. After that weekend was over, I knew that the best thing to hope for was that I would never see the dark-haired beauty again. And for a year my hopes were satisfied, leading me to believe that so casual and unlikely an acquaintance had in time been proven to be an unremarkable and totally serendipitous concurrence of circumstances.
The intervening year was one full of tropical storms and remarkable moons, a typical year in those days. I had wondered a couple of times what had become of the absent Sagittarius, but mostly I was absorbed in weathering other furious erotic gales, none more problematic than Virgo. Sagittarius had spent the time as a resident of two different homes for adolescent boys, one run by the County, the other run by the Roman Catholic Church. Now he was back with his mother and living a few blocks away, and I had the fatal problem on my hands, namely that, all other considerations notwithstanding, if he asked me for some loving, natural law and the teachings of Jesus Christ would have obliged me to give it to him. And in every case it is as the Apostle has said: "Charity suffereth long, and is kind; charity envieth not; charity vaunted not itself, is not puffed up." As a matter of practice Love "seeketh not her own." One does not kidnap such youths or even seduce them, one is entranced by them and only when they come to you, and only they can make demands, which they figure out quickly enough. And so, on Fridays we used to meet after work and school to get a sandwich and a drink at the Vale of Paradise Delicatessen. I should say, he would meet me, he wanted to talk.
What distinguishes this species of incarnate celestial beauties from the vulgar variety of male pulchritude is the seductively fitting correspondence between extraordinary physical virtue and incomparable intellectual prowess. To be enamored of the one is to be seduced by the other. If these natural wonders study on a matter, something will come of it! I gladly swam with the current, so to speak, believing that I had an escape clause that would cancel out the risk of any long-term harm: I knew that within another year I would be moving permanently to a faraway State. But in our last Friday meeting, in late spring it was, his conversation took a fatal turn.
"What do you think about being a father?" he says as he walks me home. "You know, having a family and everything?"
"Well, I don't know, why do you ask?"
"I was just thinking, it seems like a pretty hard thing to do, I wouldn't want to be my father."
"Why is that?" I inquired, like an innocent lamb on the way to slaughter.
Matter-of-factly, like he'd read it in a manual somewhere, he recites a litany of obligations: "You'd have to feed me, and buy me clothes, and get me out of trouble and stuff. And you'd have to send me to school, that cost money; and you would have to, I don't know, put up with me."
Without realizing what I was saying, I re-assured the boy, saying: "I could do all that stuff, it wouldn't be that hard, you are a really good kid, you know." How was I to know this was a job interview? Hell, I don't think he knew it until just that moment when he blurted out: "Then I should move with you." There followed a long, but not awkward, silence. Then I said, "Well, you have to finish high school. That's two years to go." I thought some more on it, and I figured the least I could get away with in this situation was to promise to help the boy go to college when the time came, something I knew would cost more money than either he or his mother could raise. So I suggested: "When you graduate from high school, you can come and live with me and I'll help you get through college."
He seemed satisfied with this commitment; and so, since he was satisfied in so serious and intimate a matter, I was emboldened to attempt for myself some satisfaction in a personal matter of equal if not greater import. I asked him, since it was our last Friday together for a long time, if I could kiss him. He studied on it for a few moments and said softly, "You shouldn't ask me right now, it might hurt me." That statement tolled true in the ringing silence that followed. In the next moment we were interrupted by the appearance at the entryway to my little house, of the aforementioned problematic Virgo, who had never met this particular Sagittarius before. It's funny how this species of fatal mythic characters renown for beauty work out their fates adjacent to each other. I introduced them to one another and then said directly and only to the Sagittarius: "I withdraw my question until some other time. Let's say goodbye, you will always have my address." And through our eyes we agreed it was a fair and proper, maybe even splendid, goodbye.
Left alone with Virgo I turned to him my undivided attention, and, coincidentally, the focus of this attention also had to do with the matter of a kiss. I don't know how many stories of these rare renowned beauties are told in mythology, but the testimony to their actuality is compelling, even indisputable, in the variety and frequency of their fatal appearances in both lore and my own life. This Virgo youth was my second life-altering, accidental encounter with a unique, beautiful, and unforgettable mortal. So far, I have known four; and God help me! with a precedent like that, I have to fear that another may be on the way. Which, of course, makes me wonder if serendipity has anything to do with the incidence of meteors streaking across the night.
With Virgo the matter of a kiss had come up between us indirectly. I saw him first when he was fifteen, and I am sure I reacted no differently than did Echo the first time she saw Narcissus or Zeus the first time he saw Ganymede. Impossibly this long-haired blonde beauty seemed even more beautiful than the first mythic beauty I had seen eight years earlier, who was also long-haired (though not as blonde), and also a Virgo! When this more recent problematic Virgo was eighteen or so, he and I happened to be in a car with a mutual friend who, inspired by good spirits, asked me forthrightly what I would wish for if I had only one wish. After considering the question thoughtfully, I answered honestly, nodding at the Virgo: "A kiss from this one." It was a subject I probably never would have broached directly with the Virgo. Stunned, flattered, and embarrassed, the youth gathered himself and, looking straight at me, said, to my utter amazement: "You'll get your kiss!" It was patently intended as a promise.
Thereafter our whole history together was the struggle to make good on that promise. The desired kiss spoken of here is understood to be a particular kind of kiss, a chaste kiss. Like tears something that occurs naturally. The chaste kiss is honest and hard-won; it is born of a moment that it transforms into an eternity; its innocence is an exquisite expression of love. The struggle to achieve these kisses, or some such experience, has come to dominate my life every time I have met up with a mythically beauteous youth.
Of the millions of moments Virgo and I spent occupied with each other, it never happened that we enjoyed the promised kiss. Altogether it was a five year struggle. At the end the kiss was precluded from happening because, not wanting to make him feel entrapped, I chose to make our farewell through a letter rather than in person. Up till now I have felt okay about it because Equity was satisfied in that I knew that he gave one chaste kiss away mercifully to a needy wayfarer, and because on five occasions over the years he had given gifts to me which were near-equivalents to chaste kisses. Besides spoken I-love-you's, he once allowed we should sleep in the same bed together, and, more astonishingly, he once stole his way into my house on a summer day, knowing I was alone, and without warning presented himself nude before me. All of which gifts were absolutely unsolicited and free from indecency.
Approximately fifteen months following this final Friday meeting Sagittarius and I would see each other again. I had moved a thousand miles away and for more than a year no communication had taken place, so I had every reason to presume that the bridge to that past of mine that included the Sagittarius adolescent was burned into oblivion. Then one night after I had been gone for more than a year I get a phone call from the stalwart lad who advises me that current distressful exigencies in his domestic situation made it unadvisable for him to finish his senior year where he was, and that he saw no reason that, in the spirit of our agreement already struck, he and I should not presently join together in a household communion, preferably before the school year then getting underway advanced another week. It was not a request I could summon the temerity to refuse.
The beauties of ancient lore are occasionally said to have been abducted by the Immortals like Zeus, Apollo, and Eos or by would-be mortal and nymph abductors like Laius, Thamyris, and Echo. Upon closer examination, however, the evidence seems to reveal that in the choice of their lovers or their decisions to runaway these youths retained to themselves the final authority to activate Fate's Decree in their destinies: Frustrating the intentions of all other would-be suitors, young Attis planned to marry the daughter of the King of Pessinus, for which plans he and that king were driven to madness and castration by the madly jealous Agdistis; Hyacinthus could have chosen the Immortal Zephyrus or the mortal bard Thamyris, but chose instead Apollo; Chrysippus stood to gain the throne of his father, Pelops, despite the jealousy of his half brothers Atreus and Thyestes, but he chose to runaway with Laius even while his father mightily pursued to rescue him; the ill-fated career of Echo and the suicide of Narcissus imply the insufficiency of anyone's ardor or power utterly to satisfy the erotic desires of Narcissus; and though it was incontestably within Zeus's power, through the contrivance of the eagle disguise, to carry away Ganymede to make him his cupbearer, the stories leave doubt that even the mighty Zeus had the power to force Ganymede to become his lover. And most of these youthful beauties of old, as the stories reveal, seemed to have been cheated of their youthful prime either by accident, self-mutilation, suicide, murder, or some other unknown (and likely untoward) event or sequence of events that led to the omission of any mention of details concerning the period of their majority.
As to the "household communion" that Sagittarius and I eventually created and maintained for a long time, perhaps it was most analogous to the union between Zeus and his cupbearer. And what was that like? To begin with, Zeus had the challenge of inserting Ganymede into the life of the family of Olympians, among whom there was Eos, the goddess of the dawn, who was afflicted with the propensity of carrying off youths distinguished for their beauty such as Orion, Cephalus, Cleitus, and Tithonus; there was Ganymede's predecessor as cupbearer, Hebe, daughter of Zeus and Hera, goddess of youthful bloom, who eventually married Heracles after he won immortality but who in the meantime, presumably, had occasion and inclination to lie by Ganymede's side and embrace him. Naughty Eros, himself the embodiment and idealization of masculine beauty, was known to play games and tricks on mortals who attracted adulation for their beauty; and we know that he enjoyed rolling dice with Ganymede. The entire Olympian community had to come to grips with the fundamental new reality that Zeus and Ganymede would henceforth spend more time alone together than either of them spent with any other living being. And no other interlocutor would be more secure against the threat of Zeus's thunderbolt than this new member of the family. Zeus now had someone to talk to when he was sorting out the findings of fact and conclusions of law in the complaints and petitions brought before him by disputing family members. By being a smart and honest observer Ganymede stood to gain a superior education from the one Magistrate of justice responsible for upholding the moral order of the universe. One need only recollect the Olympian disputes that arose out of the Trojan War to appreciate the great complexity and volatility of the typical issues that were often necessarily settled by Zeus. One can imagine that an Olympian supplicant—like Leto seeking forgiveness for Apollo whom an angry Zeus intended to banish to Tartarus for ever for killing the Cyclops—would welcome as an ally an informed and sympathetic intimate of Zeus.
A dutiful tradesman likes to teach his trade to someone he loves, who, invariably, in the tutelage becomes a son or daughter to him. Before you know it the apprentice is the journeyman's near-equal in the trade, but typically there will be basic differences. One tradesman in the liberal arts, like me, loves being creative with words and so he majors in English and political science. His Sagittarius apprentice might take up the liberal arts but choose to major in art and design. The tutor briefly pursues a career in journalism before landing a position as the Director of Public Affairs and Marketing at a Fortune Five Hundred mining company, and ultimately progresses to the independence of being a self-employed writer and consultant. His Sagittarius apprentice typically drops out of college to pursue dead end jobs like managing an art film theater before finally enrolling at an art institute to complete a B.F.A. on his way to becoming self employed as an artist. Or just as likely, in the case of a politically astute person like myself, my apprentice might major in history, then with a razor sharp wit and penchant for argument become radicalized and disaffected, eventually finding himself a neutral position, like supervisor of shipping and receiving at some medium-sized university.
Of course, someone in Zeus's position, or in mine, would also have to deal with the unexpected serious illnesses and injuries that sometimes befall the young, including those peculiar physical anomalies whose onset occurs in late adolescence and the early twenties. Who could anticipate that one so young and stunningly beautiful as one of these legendary figures would be stricken with chronic myalgia, cardiomyopathy, sporadic episodes of arrhythmia, or a completely gratuitous e coli infection—all of which conditions potentially might have lifelong health ramifications? Or, as it is often the case with infants, you might be sitting quietly together with the youth enjoying a play or movie and the youth will suddenly and unceremoniously start throwing up and you find yourself carrying him in your arms out of the room.
And perhaps most significantly, the caregiver or tutor in this household communion will be obliged by nature to come to terms with the youth's prodigious sexual needs, as well as his own. Their experiences together, all tolled, will inevitably make for an intimacy and interconnectedness unparalleled in their lives. So long as the youth has normal sexual urges—urges that embrace an extensive range of kinky pleasures—the youth will naturally be his own most diligent broker in carnal matters, but given the intensity and uniqueness of his powers of physical and intellectual attraction he will not only have his caring tutor, his guardian ad litem, as a compliant partner, he will gain as allies the numerous female pursuers who observe him and perceive his value.
Before Sagittarius turned twenty he had two sixteen-year-old aggressive suitors. The first was a simpleton Hoosier girl named Marlene who had eyes good enough to see the rare find that this Sagittarius was, but lacked the intellectual maturity and sophistication in playing the coquette to devise any strategy beyond trying to get pregnant by the boy, or any boy so long as she could claim Sagittarius was the baby's father. As soon as the boy realized that the girl was so far along that she had to have been already pregnant when he was with her, he figured out what her game was and that was the end of her story. The second sixteen-year-old, one Casey Kaifler, was quite a fetching and precocious college student, raised amongst the gentry of an affluent Florida town, who had set her sights on law school and on the boy she thought was the handsomest boy in her English class, if not in the whole school. With lawyerly deftness she maneuvered to the seat next to him in class, and as soon as she discovered his fondness for marijuana, offered him a joint of her expensive sinsemilla which he, with delight, invited her to smoke with him, for which purpose she volunteered to give him a ride in her fancy convertible to his home, my home.
This couple seemed a perfect fit. Both beautiful and smart, both diminuitive in size, Sagittarius weighing only one hundred and thirty pounds, and they knew how to make each other laugh. At least, I heard a lot of laughter coming from his room when she visited. They had, however, two frustrating problems. The already-in-place Kaifler family plan, adopted by Casey and her parents Bruce and Mavis, was that after the current semester Casey would be off to a private, more prestigious college that had a law school. Within the time allotted for their relationship the couple was too young and dependent to negotiate the logistics of a joint plan for a life together. And given that Casey was a minor and I had a house rule making minors socially out of bounds, it was something of a miracle that the boy was able to carry things as far as kissing, smooching, and consuming controlled substances. Looking back, I think this match was a tragic lost opportunity for two really good people who were right for each other.
Helga was an unwilling divorcee who, I thought, wanted nothing so much as a reconciliation with her ex-husband, an old friend of mine from the days before Sagittarius came to live with me. Sagittarius was nine or ten years her junior, and frankly it just never occurred to me that a romantic connection between them would be contemplated by either of them. I think the poor woman was blindsided by Sagittarius whom she had not met until she visited me sometime after her divorce. Seeking to solidify her access to her ex by currying favor with his boon companion, she had come for a short visit only to have her emotions and intentions waylaid by a vision of Sagittarian exquisiteness that struck her with overwhelming pheromonal force. On this day when they met, his instantaneous receptivity to her almost immediately proffered flirtations alerted me right away to the plain fact that the boy, understandably demure under the circumstances, wanted very much to be with her. I figured that since all concerned parties were of age, the good friend and host should stay out of it and let things happen as they might. The two of them found themselves on a day's outing together that included a trip to the beach. At the day's end I was surprised to discover Sagittarius lying prone on the living room floor with Helga straddling his body and rubbing his back with lotion. So I excused myself and went to bed.
In order that they might achieve total privacy Helga suggested that she finish the rubbing and massage in Sagittarius's bedroom. She suggested this right after kissing him for the first time when he turned over to have his front laved. She hadn't made up her mind to abandon her quest for reconciliation with her former husband, the thought that she could live without being rabidly in love with him had never entered her mind; but she was flattered and mesmerized by the fantasy of having a dalliance with one so young and handsome as Sagittarius. So, she followed him into his room intent on at least a long goodnight kiss for her ego and self esteem. When they got inside his room, Helga closed the door and said: "Why don't you get undressed and get in bed, that way I can say goodnight and massage you to sleep." Sagittarius saw no reason to be bashful, so he took off his pants and lay on his bed. Helga sat on the bed and began by running her fingers through his chest hairs. She felt like a delighted, carefree little girl running excitedly through tall prairie grass in expectation of some transformative joy. There is no disputing that it is a glorious chest, it is covered not immoderately by a forest of long fiery brown hairs. The more Helga touched him the hotter and wetter she got.
Sagittarius never completely understood why, except for a few intensely passionate kisses, they came that night as close to sex as they would ever get. He didn't know that she was terrified of him. Her inability to satisfy him as she had hoped was a considerable blow to her self esteem, it was the first time she had felt a physical inadequacy with a man. This situation exacerbated the sense of inadequacy she already felt as a woman because of her husband's rejection of her. Having now sensually experienced what she had, she doubted whether she could maintain any control over herself. Moreover, she was paranoid that she would never be adequate enough completely to satisfy the youth's sexual desires. Before going to sleep that night she came to the decision that the safer course for her was to pursue reconciliation with her former husband and abandon the hope and risk of any serious relationship with the beautiful young Sagittarius.
Emily Saintsbury, who is about the same age as Helga, also got involved with young Sagittarius. She was smaller, prettier, and smarter than Helga, but she was no less susceptible to the sexual magnetism of my young and beautiful Sagittarius companion. Unlike Helga, Emily had seen and satisfied sundry male lovers in her time. She, too, was an old friend who visited my house from time to time, and therefore in all matters concerning my household she afforded to me great deference and courtesy. I asked Emily after she had seen Sagittarius a few times at my home, "What do you think of my Sagittarius friend? Has he got anything a healthy Hoosier wench might find interesting? Like on a scale from one to ten?" I could tell by her answer that she had already checked the boy out and wanted to jump his bones, she said: "I'll tell you this, the boy has got nothing to be ashamed of!" Well, for weeks Sagittarius had been confidentially alluding to his desperate desire to "eat some pussy and get laid," so I decided to do some benevolent pandering and said to Emily, "Are you saying that if you found the boy in your bed tonight, you wouldn't kick him out?" "Oh no," she said, "if I got a package like that for a present, I'd have to check it out." I told her that I was going to tell him what she said, and that she shouldn't be surprised at what might turn up.
Since they were considerate enough not to close the bedroom door later that night when Sagittarius showed up in Emily's bed, I got to hear the sounds of the goings-on that were reported to me later in more detail by the participants. They were together all night. The next morning Emily, who could barely walk, sheepishly confided to Sagittarius: "I suppose I ought to thank you for last night." "What do you mean?" asked the baffled youth. "Well," she said, "you got me off." The young man didn't really comprehend exactly what she meant. She explained further: "You got me off! Which never happened before. Several times! Which may never happen again, for all I know. So, I suppose I should thank you." She told me later that she had never been so patiently and effectively attended to by any lover.
Not a few women, who were positively giddy over Sagittarius's good looks and were virtually salivating over a chance of going to bed with him, never got to first base with him. Many of the women at his workplace wanted to attempt to gain sexual favors from him, but most were unsuccessful. The Dean of Arts and Sciences turned into a gushing, blushing ingenue whenever he was around her, and she made every conversation with me an opportunity to flatter the young man she thought inordinately handsome. Unfortunately for her, her high position in a university administration that was obsessively fearful about sexual harassment lawsuits, made her too timid to boldly declare her desires to the object of her affections. Not so in the case of the flamboyant and brazen Vice President of Student Affairs; she literally groped the surprised young Sagittarius in an elevator and offered him all sorts of bribes if he would go home with her. This completely turned him off, and he never gave her another serious thought or an opportunity to grope him.
By the acquisition of a devastatingly beautiful youth into one's household communion, one who has a concern for justice and virtue and upholding all that is sacred and holy in the moral order of the universe inevitably will assess the value of the gain and the loss of so precious an asset. Zeus saw it as a measure of the loss and a requirement of justice that Ganymede's father in Troy receive the news of the loss of his son from no less honorable a messenger than Hermes, and that the father be compensated with the gift of a pair of horses highly valued by the Olympians—horses said to be brisk-trotting, swift as a storm, and capable of running over water and standing corn. Zeus similarly decided that Eos, who fell in love with Ganymede and claimed an Immortal's right to have him, ought to be fairly compensated for her loss when Zeus claimed the beautiful mortal for himself, and so he acceded to her wish for her new mortal lover Tithonus to be granted immortality.
And when Zeus himself lost the mortal beauty Ganymede from his own household, the ancients tell us that Zeus compensated himself for the loss by lifting the Trojan boy above the stars. As if to say, in measure of his loss, that his universe was so substantially changed that among the stars a new image, the image of Aquarius, must be included.
How am I to be compensated for this most grievous loss of Sagittarius? What is a just balm for a sorrow more profound and persistent than any I have known or could ever have imagined? What are mere mortals to make of such a loss? The loss of a boy, the value of whose natural beauty has been enhanced by the love we shared whilst he sojourned in my house? He is not a god and I am no Zeus to make him one; thus in these times it would violate a sense of Proportion to build to him great altars and temples and to offer great sacrifices. If I lived in ancient Greece or Rome I might worship him as a hero and celebrate his honor in a great festival named for him, but mine is not an age that recognizes or tolerates as a valid religious institution what it would consider to be a sodomitic priesthood. This mourning of mine is as black and bottomless as the sleep of the longest dark night in Hades; and, like Zeus, I feel my universe has been permanently diminished, unless and until by some new creation I can find solace for this grief.
Of course I should have known that things would never change, that it would never be any different. But there are two things happening now that no previous sorrow of which I know forewarned. Since the day Sagittarius left my household I find no music able to soothe my troubled breast, the comfort of the singing of the ancient Muses is denied me—a grievous loss in and of itself. And, before Sagittarius departed, I had never heard tell of anyone dreaming about the same person every night for months on end. Nor would I have believed such a thing possible for me or anyone else. I don't recall ever dreaming about the same person more than two nights in a row; that is, until now. Perhaps for mortal lovers who live lives immured within the confines of the blackest grief it is only in the domain of dreams that they can yet manipulate the image of the beloved and lift him above the stars. Every night in my dreams Sagittarius returns to my house, goes about his business as normal, but rarely looks into my eyes, and never acknowledges my presence except to answer a question I pleadingly put to him, usually by repeating some version of the statement "All that needs to be said is already said."
Disconsolate now, never having received the kiss requested so long ago, I must pray to Heaven that in my flood of dreams I shall discover the bright nectar in the golden bowl from which the Immortals drank; and that, when all is said and done, I will be confirmed in my hope that the millions and millions of golden moments Sagittarius shared with me will be tantamount to the just compensation that I know the Father of Heaven must decree.
Thomas Penn Johnson was born on August 22nd, 1943 in Greensboro, North Carolina. He holds a BA in Classical Studies (1966) from then-Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne, Indiana; an MA in English (1968) from UNC-G; and an MA in history (1982) from Wake Forest University. In 2009 he retired from then-Edison State College in Fort Myers, Florida after serving for 26 years as an instructor of English and humanities.