God tells his drinking buddy about King Solomon, the richest person in the world in his time.
As God and I were walking past the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, a building named for its wealthy benefactor, I couldn’t help but think of King Solomon, the richest person in the world in his time. I mentioned this well-to-do fellow to God and received the following reply.
“He worshiped me,” God said, “but he also claimed to worship other deities like Ashtoreth, Chemosh, and Molech. I’m sure he would have worshiped the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl if there’d been any Aztec women in Israel.”
“Why was he such a promiscuous believer?” I asked.
“Because he was such a promiscuous guy. He’d walk up to a pretty Moabite girl and say to her, ‘I adore your god Chemosh with all my heart and soul. If he asked me to eat a meal of camel turds, I’d gladly do so just to please him.’ If that didn’t work, Solomon would produce a large bag of gold, and that would work.”
“I gather the Queen of Sheba, a black woman, was one of his wives.”
“She was. After all, he wasn’t a racist. In addition to Queeny, as he called her, he had 700 wives and 300 concubines. Or was it 700 concubines and 300 wives? Mathematics isn’t my strong suit.”
“Don’t you think he might have stockpiled a few too many females?”
God nodded his head in agreement. “With King Solomon procuring every woman in sight,” he said, “I didn’t think there would be any women left for other men, and human genes would suffer as a consequence. So I wondered what I should do.”
“Did you turn his virile member into, say, a toad?”
“No, but I did something that was just as effective — I turned his bags of
gold into bags of copper and zinc. Thus most of the women he now courted had no interest in him…except, of course, for those women who were infatuated with these trace minerals.”
“I have a feeling that King Solomon mightn’t have appreciated this deed.”
“He was baffled by it. ‘What’s going on?’ he asked me. I lied and told him that it wasn’t my fault, but geology’s fault. It probably wanted to stop human beings from being so possessive toward gold, lest the world’s supply run out, I said. Solomon believed this because he believed in me. And from then on, his harem didn’t exceed 1,000 women. Actually, it ended up being much less. For at least half of his women left him when they discovered he possessed only bags of trace minerals.”
“The poor bastard!” I said.
“Coincidentally, we passed a bar where the Suffering Bastard Cocktail was on the menu. We had no choice but to go in and order this not inappropriate drink.
Part of a series detailing Lawrence Millman’s experiences with his drinking buddy, God. Soon to be gathered together, assuming a publisher is interested, as a mini-memoir entitled “Drinks With God.”
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