Saint Simeon Stylites of Las Vegas


2006


        He was an hour east of Las Vegas, driving back to Los Angeles from Denver, where he had just been divorced from a woman he still loved.

         They had met as freshmen at Boulder.  It was first love and first sex.  He still admired almost everything about her.  She was tall, blond, with long legs and small firm breasts, and had a lovely, intelligent face.  But after seven years she increasingly wanted children.  And he wanted--well, he didn’t know exactly what he wanted; but whatever it was, it was not children.  He never had.  Perhaps she had thought he would change.

        His appearance at the final court hearing was not necessary, but he wanted to be there.  It seemed right, rather than let something that had began so sweetly be ended by bored lawyers.

        He was driving toward another woman, darker and with a more voluptuous body that he could not get enough of.

        By chance, and slightly disturbingly, they shared a common first name.  He was driving from Mary to Mary.

        He was driving a red Volkswagen Beetle, whose curved roof would soon make his life more difficult.  He had been driving since noon, with only a couple of short breaks, and now it was after midnight.

        The radio was playing a mix of soft rock and country.  On the hour there was a news break to which he was mostly oblivious.

        The divorce had not been the only significant event in his life that year.

        In March he had received the long-expected draft notice.  It had been hanging over him, as it hung over all young men that year when the number of troops deployed in Vietnam tripled, and had kept him working desultorily at UCLA on a Ph.D in history  that he really did not want, until the issue was resolved.  

        A year earlier, when it became obvious that he would eventually be called up, he tried to get a commission in the Navy; but his vision was too poor to be a line officer, much less fly, and so he decided to take his chances with the draft.   Failing the physical and being classified 1-Y was a great relief.  He wasn’t politically opposed to the war in Vietnam, but he didn’t want to be a part of any organization as big and bureaucratic as the military, and he particularly did not want to have to take orders as a draftee.  His conclusion from history was that warriors did not die for their cause or country as often as they died because of the stupidity and vanity of generals and politicians. 

        His exemption from the draft changed everything and soon led to the divorce.   No longer was there a reason to wait.

    Few other cars were heading toward Las Vegas at that time of night from the east.  Ahead he could just make out the first dim loom of lights from the neon city.  Off to the right darkness was occasionally broken by brief flickering lightning, too distant for thunder.

        “Perhaps the oldest human record of endurance,” said a radio voice that caught his attention, “is that of Saint Simeon Stylites the Elder, who lived on the top of a series of ever higher pillars in the Syrian desert.  Famed for the austerity of his self-mortifications, which included passing the whole of Lent without eating or drinking, he moved onto the first of his pillars, which was nine feet high, to escape hordes of pilgrims who came to observe him.  But this, of course, only increased his reputation for holiness.  Over the years he moved ever higher on a succession of pillars built by his followers, the last of which was apparently more than fifty feet tall.  While balustrades were built around the edge of the platforms at the pillar tops, the saint refused any cabin or shelter and remained constantly exposed to the elements.   On this date, September 2, in 459 A.D., Saint Simeon Stylites died after spending thirty-six years living on the top of pillars, a record that has lasted more than one thousand five hundred years and will never be broken.

        And that’s The Amazing Guinness World Record of the Day.”

        After a momentary pause another voice said, “Now here’s the latest from The Mamas and The Papas, “Monday. Monday.”  And the music resumed.

        Perhaps it was only because he was in a desert himself, although unseen;  perhaps if he had heard the Guinness item while driving on the Santa Monica Freeway, or on almost any other day of his life.

        ‘Thirty-six years,’ he thought.  ‘I will be twenty-seven in November.  Thirty-six years.  Say, thirty-seven to be certain.  I would be sixty-four.  I should live that long.  They didn’t say how old Stylites was when he climbed onto his first pillar or when he died.  I wonder what it would be like out there in all weather.’

        He turned and peered into the darkness.  The headlights of approaching cars briefly illuminated patches of sand, a few rocks and even fewer scattered scraggly cactus.  No pillars.

        ‘I could build one from the rocks.’

        It was just fantasy.  Idle speculation.

        He rolled down the window.  At seventy miles an hour the night desert air was cool, almost cold.  ‘The Saint must have fried during the day and frozen at night.  For God?  Or his own pride?  Did he come to need the attention of the followers he sought to escape?  Like Howard Hughes attracting media attention by living like a hermit in one of the hotels ahead.   Howard Hughes as saint.  The hotel as pillar.’  The idea pleased him and he smiled.

        The lights of the city filled the sky now.  This was still first-growth Las Vegas where eight or ten stories was a tall building. 

        He passed a huge neon cowboy.  Then The Sands.  The Dunes.  The Mirage.  Neon everywhere.   Night banished.  Dean Martin was appearing  and Sammy Davis.  Howard Hughes was up there somewhere.  He wasn’t sure which hotel.   Excited crowds on sidewalks and  bunched at corners.  And then abruptly it ended and he was driving through darkness again.

        He had a practical mind.  Beyond enduring the elements, Stylites’ followers must have brought him food and water.  And they must have carried away his waste.  At the top of the highest pillar he would have had some privacy; but on the first at only nine feet?  Back then he must have used a pottery bowl or urn.  He remembered the bucket in the back from when he last washed the Volkswagen.  Were there ladders or a basket on a rope at St. Stylites’ pillars?  And the boredom.  And the unfulfilled desire.  But perhaps the saint had been immune to lust?  He thought not.  Probably the contrary.  The Saint, like himself, was more lustful than most men, and it was to subdue that lust that he mortified himself.

        There was more traffic.  Even in the middle of the night a steady stream of headlights on the other side of the highway, heading toward the casinos.  He would certainly not go unnoticed.

        What if he did it?  What if he pulled off the highway and drove fifty or hundred yards into the desert and got out and gathered rocks and built a pillar and climbed up and sat on it?   The thoughts and words gained momentum and ran together.

        He would be totally dependent on others.  For food; for water; to haul his shit away.  And who would do that?  No, a highway patrolman would haul him away and he’d  deservedly be locked up in a mental institution.  But what if they didn’t?  Was it illegal to sit on a pillar in the desert?  Probably he would be trespassing on someone’s property; probably the government’s.  What would he say?  “I heard an item on the radio about Saint Stylites living on the top of pillars for 36 years and decided to break his record.”

        Perhaps it would depend on who stopped and came to investigate him first:  the law; believers; the media. 

        He drove on.  He was not certain if he was still in Nevada or had crossed into California, and it did not make any difference.  The desert did not recognize state lines. 

        The highway was straight and flat.  In the rear view mirror no headlights were visible.  His foot went to the brake and as the car slowed, he made a sharp right hand turn and left the road.  The Volkswagen bounced over rocks and into ruts and came to a stop.  He turned off the lights.

        For a few minutes the only sound was his panting, rapid and erratic as though he had been running.  Then the sound of an approaching car.  He tensed.  The sound rose, passed, diminished.  They had not seen him.

        He opened the door and climbed out.  

        ‘I can’t believe I’m really doing this,’ he thought as he began to search for rocks.

        At intervals cars whizzed past seventy yards away, and he became confident that they could not see him.   He had until dawn.

        The rocks were too few, though one of them was smooth and round and laden with regret:  it was the size and weight of her breast in his palm.

        As the sky began to lighten, he had  only a pathetic mound a foot high.   Sitting there he would hardly be off the ground.  He would be looking up at whoever came, rather than down.  It would not do.  There was only the Volkswagen.   For the first time he wished it had a flat roof.

        He balanced the yellow plastic bucket, a half bottle of Coke-Cola, and the coat he had worn to the hearing in Denver:  he could sit on it rather than directly on the metal during the day and wear it at night--if he made it to the night--on the top of the car, and, with difficulty, climbed up himself.

        While he sat there, cross-legged, watching headlights, waiting for dawn and discovery, he wondered how Saint Stylites moved from pillar to pillar.  Was he carried?  Or was it permitted to walk on your own?


        As you know, all this happened thirty-seven years ago tomorrow.