UnBooks:Biography: The guy who invented soap
UnBooks Dedication:
Paos, a prehistoric Clovis culture American warrior who lived large on the land and reigned over so many women that they could not be counted, invented soap - which is Paos spelled backwards. Men called him their friend, and went to hunt with him, and baked the bread as only a man chef can bake it. Paos The Great, his story we tell.
Chapter One, or How a man conquers his fear of death
"Bend me into a pretzel, do it now Paos," said Bridgette'a, one of his uncounted women, and a few minutes later Paos listened to her moans and watched as she trembled, shook, and then screamed out "Now wash me, Paos. Wash me!"
Paos didn't know what she was talking about. Wash her? What did that even mean?
"Go to sleep Bridgette'a, now is not the time," Paos said, hoping his standard walk-away line would be enough to get him out of whatever he was in.
But it wasn't.
"Wash me, Paos, please, wash me," Bridgette'a said as she slithered under him, rubbing something on his leg. It was some kind of stick. She wanted him to rub a stick all over her, to knock the dirt and rotting leaves off. "I've gotten into a hell of a jam here," Paos said to himself, using the Clovis culture's ancient word for hell - tlayōhuatizannō pive za. He took the stick from her mud covered hands and started to knock earth and vegetable matter from her limbs.
While running the rough bark over her ("You're washing me, Pao, you're washing me!") Paos noticed that some of the stuff had ants in it. Other lumps, those of clay and pebbles, were too solid to have any insect life. In those areas he had to use his fingers to extract embedded pieces of fruit. He had come here for the horseplay, got that over with, and now he was stuck in something very weird. He felt like one of those bronzed idiots down at the beach.
It turned out that "washing" - the art of stick scraping - was how a guy in Bridgette'a caste described it once after climbing a tree and accidently knocking some of it off. But he and almost everyone else in the world just left the stuff on. Hardly anybody wanted to waste their time gouging everything off themselves, let alone be digging around on someone else.
The kind who knocked lots of it off were known as "dandys" and "Mice People". What you could see of your average citizen was the color of their eyes and those two little blow holes under them. If you could count their toes they were considered "ultra sophishticates".
By the time Paos removed most of the jejēramijee (the ancient Clovis culture word for body paste) from Bridgette'a, and saw the pile of rotted foliage, decayed epidermis, and tiny animal bones already attracting flies and dung beetles, he thought "There has to be a better way".
Chapter Two, or How the wild things sour
The next night he was in logs and moss with Heldergarden, a wonderful solutrean girl from the outtown that he'd met on a snake hunt in the hinterlands. Paos has just mocholo'ed her six ways to Sunday, and enjoyed every sunrise. She lay on his long-cot now, her adorable body adorned with natural things as thick as cactus roots, a smile under there somewhere. The crust and moss on her was at least six beetles thick, counting the antenni. "She looks like a decomposing log," Paos thought. He'd never noticed that before. As he caressed a rotting severed dinner paw in the vicinity of her hip, and smelled what was layered on her kajoomy-giel, he found himself asking Heldergarden "Can I dig on you?"
"What?" she said. "You know, take a stick and poke it off," he explaned, pantomiming the procedure. "Well that's a new please and thank you, lizard claw. You phasing? Yeah, Kinky is what it is. I've been wondering what's under some of this stuff. Go for it"
Paos quickly went outside and found not one, but three sticks, with varying knobs and curvatures. He picked up a few bumpy rocks too, then took out his favorite stone knife and cleaned them of soil. Sitting there, rubbing the forest slime from the sticks and rocks, Paos pondered an experiment. He thought maybe he had something in mind.
So Paos knocked it off Heldergarden, most of it falling away in sheets that felt like turtle shell. For the tiny scrapings and the hair, which were both difficult until the insects crawled away and the twitching calmed, he used spit and pond slime to rinse off the leavings. Heldergarden's hair turned out to be yellow, something like a flower, or the gold clogging the river. He would never have guessed.
"You make me pretty" Heldergarden smeared, rubbing her skin like it was new egg. "Why don't we move into clay hole together and have one of those tiny people. You say?"
Paos ran away so fast that he was clocked at a mile a minute, and Heldergarden couldn't catch him if she ran a wind-aided two miles a minute.
Chapter Three, or Cattle and bison lead the way to tiny Mary's doomsville
Alright, Paos decided, he liked them better with the stuff off. But the scraping and the digging and the picking was just too much work. Then inspiration came to him, as it often does, in the form of a Wood Bison.
Wood Bisons, giant forms of the common bison, were dropping like flies under the skill of the Clovis culture's stone spears and knives. Paos saw one fall, and joined the tribe as it swooped on the Wood Bison like buzzards on white meat. As the bison's innards and outards were cut into easily carried pieces, Paos noticed that when his friend, Glucko, wiped some of the fat along his forehead, a bit of the stuff came off and slithered to the ground. Like a scientist on mushrooms, Paos carved off a hunk of the beast's fat and took it away to boil down in a bubbling mixture of lye and bat guano. He threw in a cattle for good measure. Then, to his surprise, when the goo stopped gurgling, belching bones, and cooled, he had a solid! Paos carved it into palm sized slighty-rectangular pieces, grabbed one, and ran down to the river.
The river ran wild that day, and people stood around staring and pointing at the fish they could not reach (Paos would handle that the following week, with something he called a "pole"). Paos walked past the crowd, soaked the solid bar in the water, and rubbed it on his arm. Lo and behold, it began to foam like a saber-toothed tiger trotting towards a monkey with a broken leg. When Paos stuck his whole arm into the river, the stuff rinsed away! With the bar in hand he raced to the nearest woman he saw, tiny Mary, threw her in the river, soaked her, rub-a-dub-dubbed all over her, and soaked her again. Too long this time, for Mary accidently drowned. But the tribesmen, whooping and hollering and "ooh!"ing so loudly that they scared the birds, sloths, and panthers from the trees, pushed each other out of the way to get a good look at the corpse. The stuff had come off, and tiny Mary was beautiful! Thus was born both the "use of soap" and - as Glecko sauntered forward and the others followed - the manly art of necrophilia.
Paos had never had a happier day.
