The Three Christs of Ypsilanti - Milton Rokeach [102]
… I am thrice a truthful simple servant of God, a boy eunuch for the kingdom of heaven …
It is going on two years … since I am all boy, never again to be a morphodyte-cosmic, for I would not exchange being all boy for all the treasure in the world piled in one big pile!
Following the question as I now phrased it to Leon —Is your wife an hermaphrodite?—a question which Leon was slow in answering, I went on to ask whether he recalled having said anything about being an hermaphrodite in Cause and Evolution.
Leon corrected me: the word was morphodite. “I don’t care for the word hermorphodite,” he went on, “because of the her which would split a testicle sack. Since I corrected it, the female part has gone away. However, I never used it as such; therefore, I am only male.”
—Whatever gave you the idea of being a morphodite?—
“Statements by persons when I was going to school and also incidents of approaching, and particular touches made.”
He recounted with horror an experience he had in Europe, when he was going on eight, with a boy of nine or ten. “I fornicated through the mouth—twice his mouth and twice mine. . . . That’s the way God permits a person to know the right use of the penis, if they accept the distinction between right and wrong.”
—It must have been a very disturbing experience for you.—
“I was very deeply startled and frightened.”
I then asked Leon to make a contribution to the theory of symbolism by explaining what he meant by the vine and the rock. He gave the explanation quite cheerfully.
“The vine is both the ureter and the penis. The rock is both breasts, temporary nectar stones—temporary because they are hard only during sexual intercourse—and testicles.”
I brought the subject back to the letters and Madame God.
“It is possible I may see her,” Leon said. “It comes to me that God may be a morphodite.”
At about this time an aide came in with a letter for Leon, saying that a woman had given it to him.
“Oh, was she a woman about five feet five, blue eyes, longish nose?”
—Yes.—
“Thank you,” said Leon, “that’s God.”
He opened the letter, read it silently, and then said: “She signed it Madame Yeti Woman.”
—What does it say?—
“My dear husband,” Leon read aloud, “I am happy to be able to say that I can send you at this time the enclosed one dollar. I expect you to use this to buy yourself refreshments and a ballpoint pen for your use today. Sincerely yours, Madame Yeti Woman.”
—Amazing! What’s that in it?—
“Money is a means to an end.”
Leon is the only person I have ever known who had absolutely no use for money. By comparative standards, he was rich: he had close to a thousand dollars in his account at the hospital’s business office; and as the account was never drawn on, it grew larger year by year as a result of his small veteran’s pension. But, according to Leon, it was not his—after all, it was held under his dupe name. “I have no use for money,” he once informed us, “I don’t want no part of it. I don’t want a thing that don’t belong to me. I don’t deserve it.” Nor would he accept his small weekly allowance from us, or money from any other source. As he explained it: “Where thy treasure is, there is thy heart.[1] If you are absorbed with engrams of thought that deal with money, you’re a stumbling block unto yourself in most instances—anxiety, worry comes with it after you obtain money, and your desire to have more money, and then your desire to have it protected—all these bring about something which is not helpful to the physical, mental, and spiritual. I was making a hundred twenty-five dollars a week, and then to have that lame-brain Eve squander it on pimps. No, I don’t approve of that. The particular person that misused money, why, she made me sick towards money.”
Leon was now gazing at the dollar bill that had been enclosed in his letter with an intensity of expression which puzzled me.
—What are you looking at?—
Suddenly I realized that he was really doing something I had not expected