by Tom Robbins
They locked the roadhouse at five o'clock and set out in aid of the baboon-napper. There was some preliminary concern about what to do with Mon Cul. “What if this well-dressed man has some kind of psychotic fixation about baboons? Rather than just liking them as we do, that is. He may freak out when he sees Mon Cul. God knows what he might do. On the other hand, suppose the man in the natty checkered suit is merely one of a band of international baboon thieves currently operating in the area. If we leave Mon Cul at home he might be abducted before we return.” Eventually, it was decided that leaving Mon Cul in his bed in John Paul's sanctuary was a minimal risk. Certainly less chance of hassle than taking him to Seattle. Even if Mr. Marvelous had no naughty fetish, should the Zillers jitterbug into the police station with a baboon on a leash they would no doubt, in the peculiar eyes of the law, be implicating themselves in Marvelous' crime. Good-bye, Mon Cul. Away they drove.
"I've been expecting you,” said Marx Marvelous. “What took you so long?"
On the way to Seattle, it had clouded over and begun to rain. “Short spring,” observed Ziller without malice. It was really pelting down by the time they reached the city. The Seattle Public Safety Building (jail being considered essential to public safety) sat in the rain without crack or fault. It was clean as a pyramid but lacked a pyramid's grace. Monolithic, without interval or tension, it was an unbroken mass of arrogance and power. Except for one embarrassing intrusion: fear. Each small human, uniformed or more sanely dressed, who entered its doors carried fear into the building as a fly carries disease into the soup.
This fear, plus bureaucratic expedience and general poor taste, had left the interior of the structure depressing indeed. In the elevator, Baby Thor had begun to cry. His sobs had been an indication of things to come. It had taken the Zillers several cruel hours to spring Marx Marvelous. Although he was charged merely with two misdemeanors—"destruction of municipal property” and “attempt to commit larceny"—the neatly groomed Mr. M. had not been considered a prime candidate for bond due to the fact that he possessed neither identification papers nor permanent address. The police desired that he remain their guest. Upon scrutiny of John Paul, the desk sergeant had failed to understand why he was not behind bars as well. Finally, however, with the help of an American Civil Liberties Union attorney and after the signing of numerous incomprehensible documents and after the posting of twice the normal percentage of bail, the sergeant had dispatched a flunky to the cells to procure the mysterious Marx Marvelous.
“I've been expecting you,” said Marx Marvelous. “What took you so long?”
He was a pleasant-looking fellow. The newspaper had reported that he was about twenty-five, but the leisurely hours in jail obviously had rested him for he looked a few years younger than that. (Actually, as the Zillers were soon to learn, Marx Marvelous was thirty—about the same age as John Paul and Plucky Purcell.) The P-I reporter had been right about the man's grooming: neat. Equally correct concerning his olive-and-rust checkered suit: natty. He was not handsome in the traditional American sense. His face was too soft for that—soft, sensitive, moon-cheeked, shy-smiled, babyish. He was . . . well, let's use the word: cute. Women would probably find him attractive. Amanda did. But for all his apparent sensitivity, there was grit in him, too. His eyes were as full of mischief as Jack the Ripper. He could, it was plain to see, be as ornery as dried bird shit. He had sandy hair and was of medium height and build.
“You were expecting us?” asked Amanda. John Paul was giving the man a sample of Egyptian eye power.
“Of course,” he spoke with something of a drawl. “You're Amanda, aren't you?” A little self-consciously, he kissed her hand. “That's Baby Thor strapped to your back there. And you are John Paul Ziller. Well, well. I saw an exhibition of your work once. Motorized ostrich eggs. Ummm. Yes. Most remarkable. I have often wondered if those eggs could really fly.” He offered his hand. Ziller shook it warily.
“I don't get it. How do you know us? And how were you sure we'd come bail you out?” Amanda's native curiosity was popping its buttons.
“I wasn't sure you would, but I rather expected you to. That's why I'm in this lice bin.” His gesture took in his immediate surroundings, and the desk sergeant glowered most dangerously “I went to a great deal of trouble to find you two. Or rather to have you find me.”
“You mean,” asked Amanda, “that this whole business, this baboon-stealing caper, was a plot to have us meet you?”
“You might say that.”
She went giggly. “For God's sake, why?”
“Well, Nearly Normal Jimmy gave me a great deal of information about you, but he neglected to disclose precisely where I might find you. In fact, I don't believe he knew precisely where to find you, and he flew off to the Orient before I could ask him for approximate directions. Of course, I knew that you were within a sixty-mile radius of Seattle, but I couldn't, lacking funds and identification, hire a car and scour the countryside. I did inquire about you—to no avail—in the more likely looking taverns and coffeehouses. Either your acquaintances are protecting you well, or you have remained amazingly anonymous.”
“We seldom come to the city. So, you're a friend of Nearly Normal's, are you? Wonderful. But why did you want to find us so badly? And who are you, really? What's Nearly Normal doing in the Orient?”
“Let's get out of this dungeon, may we? I'll answer those questions tomorrow at the job interview.”
“What job interview?”
“I am applying for a job at your roadside zoo. The position of manager.”
There was a funny weight-shifting silence.
“You do need a manager, do you not? Nearly Normal was certain you'd be in need of one by now.”
Amanda and John Paul stared at one another. Only that morning they had been discussing the prospects of finding someone to run the roadhouse for them. The operation of the cafe and zoo, as simple as they had arranged it, was consuming more time and energy than they had anticipated. And the summer tourist season had not really begun.
“We'll discuss everything at the interview. For the moment you must get me to a drugstore. Unless you have some Preparation H in your possession. Four days on a Greyhound bus and twenty-four hours on a cement jail floor have my anal tissues in full bloody blossom. What a plague! You women think you have it bad, having babies. Well, a woman can only give birth once every nine months, but a hemorrhoid sufferer goes through labor every time he goes to the crapper. Come on.”
The hemorrhoid sufferer called Marx Marvelous kept a journal. It was nothing at all like the journal of John Paul Ziller. There was not an entry in it which read:
“When following the spoor of the Mirror Eaters it is wise not to tread on their droppings.”
Nor was there an entry which read:
“On to the Equator! We can see it from here. It's beginning to sag. Poor foundation, probably. A challenge to future engineers. Tonight we will dine in the equatory, observing the mathematical swarmings of stars as we chew. We will wash out our socks among the swans of the equatory and hang them to dry upon the tusks of the equatory. And if he hand outstretched is the Wild Man's hand, we'll drop our bag of wishes in.”
There were no entries such as those. Marx Marvelous was not a magician. He did not travel Africa or India. He had not met the Wild Man nor shared a vision of the Bearded Heart. Still, his journal is not without a smidgen of literary merit, if for no other reason than that it offers some insight into conditions at Skagit County's roadside attraction prior to the arrival of the Corpse. For the temperature and texture afforded by its projection of the period, let the author quote from it moderately as he discharges the next installment of his report.
When I arrived in Seattle, the sun was shining and the sky was blue. In its interior streets, away from its old busy waterfront, Seattle proved to be not unlike any other American city of comparable size. With one exception. Looming over the city, beyond its modern skyline, filling the whole southeastern sector of s
ky, was an enormously tall, enormously broad snow-frosted volcanic cone of mountain: Rainier. It was big and beautiful enough to be disorienting, to make one gasp, to lift one out of context, to stimulate swoops of fancy. I imagined Mt. Rainier to be an iceberg toward which the crowded city was sailing full speed ahead. At any moment there would be a heavens-splitting crunch. Seattle would go down like the Titanic. I could envision the mayor and his council huddled on the sinking roof of City Hall singing “Near My God to Thee."
The sky was still blue, the sun still beaming when they locked me up. But during my incarceration it had begun to rain. The legendary Seattle rain. It was a thin gray rain; hard and fast and cold. In it, we had to walk four blocks from the Public Safety Building to the Zillers' Jeep—we were at its mercy. As was my custom in such elements I hunkered against the rain, drew my head into my collar, turned my eyes to the street, tensed my footsteps and proceeded in misery. But my hosts, I soon noticed, reacted in quite another way. They strolled calmly and smoothly, their bodies perfectly relaxed. They did not hunch away from the rain but rather glided through it. They directed their faces to it and did not flinch as it drummed their cheeks. They almost reveled in it. Somehow, I found this significant. The Zillers accepted the rain. They were not at odds with it, they did not deny it or combat it; they accepted it and went with it in harmony and ease. I tried it myself. I relaxed my neck and shoulders and turned my gaze into the wet. I let it do to me what it would. Of course, it was not trying to do anything to me. What a silly notion. It was simply falling as rain should, and I a man, another phenomenon of nature, was sharing the space in which it fell. It was much better regarding it that way. I got no wetter than I would have otherwise, and if I did not actually enjoy the wetting, at least I was free of my tension. I could even smile. What I smiled at was the realization that I had been in the Zillers' company less than fifteen minutes and already their example had altered my behavior. Surely, I was on the right track.
It was another roadside attraction. How different from the hundreds of attractions that line AmericaÕs highways (like toys on meandering asphalt shelves) one could not tell from the preliminary advertising.
ROADSIDE ATTRACTION-2 MI.
was all the first sign said. The second was slightly more specific.
SNAKES ALIVE!
See the Vanishing Reptiles
Serpents on the Brink of Extinction
FOOD JUICE
1 MI.
If the third billboard was more elaborate it was primarily because it was dominated by a drawing of a grotesque and ominous green-globe-eyed insect.
KILLER OF MILLIONS!
See the Deadly Tsetse Fly
free Wildlife Preserve FREE
Hot Dogs Film
600 Yards
Although I was not astute enough to notice it at the time, each of the signs had been strategically placed so as not to interfere with an appreciation of the countryside (vegetable fields and waterways and a distant ring of wooded hills and dim purple mountaintops.) This was even true of the fourth sign, which was red and gold and approached the ornate.
FLEA CIRCUS
Live Performing Fleas
Fun for Young and Old
See the Chariot Race in Miniature
See Ben Hur the Flea
Food & Fruit Juice—300 Yds.
The last sign was a summary of those which preceded it, with one rather esoteric addition.
NEARLY EXTINCT REPTILES!
AFRICA'S WINGED KILLER!
FLEA CIRCUS
The meaning of meaning
FREE 100 YARDS
To the connoisseur of Americana or to the fan of popular culture, perhaps there is a kind of poetry in those signs, typical as they are (except for one annoying allusion to “meaning") of the lurid enticements that beckon with bandaged thumbs all along the tourist trails of this continent. As for me, although I am an analytical man by both instinct and inclination, I find in such roadside ballyhoo precious little food for intellectual mastication. Yet there is a measure of substance in it, I suppose.
There was a time when Americans stayed put. For the majority of them, journeys were short and few. Consequently, their live entertainment came to them. The circus, the carnival, the dog-and-pony show, the wild West extravaganza, the freak show, the medicine wagon, the menagerie, brought to the towns and villages on their muddy itineraries glimpses of worlds which the sedentary folks had never visited; not just ethnic and geographical oddities but the worlds of romance and glamour and adventure and style. As we became urbanized and sophisticated and, above all, mobile—highly, highly mobile—the touring attractions naturally declined. That there is still potency in their imagery, fascination in their naive promise of magic, exotica and unknown quantities, is evident in the proliferation of roadside attractions. Today, the tawdry wonders do not come to us, we go to them.
Stop. Ahead. Five hundred yards. See. Camera bugs welcome. Fur Seal Caves. Rocks of Mystery. Frontier Village. Jungle Land. Reptile Farm (see them milk the diamond-backs). Indian Burial Mounds. Alligator Gardens. Swamp Creatures. Big Game Country. Little Africa. Bibletown. Old West Museum. Wild Animal Ranch (see rare white deer). The smell of gasoline and fatty hamburgers mingles with the shabby odors of half-starved mistreated animals. Milkshake blenders whine and jukeboxes jingle-jangle and toilets flush. Stop. The tourists stop, happy for an excuse to pull off the dangerous hot highways; a place for mommie and the kids to pee, a place to stretch the legs, reload the Kodak, mail postcards, buy cigarettes, drink a Coke, see. See. See something they've never seen before. Gila monster. King cobra. Billy the Kid's shootin' iron. Masturbating monkeys. Humpty Dumpty in papier mache. Or, in the case of the Capt. Kendrick Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Preserve, a flea circus and the meaning of meaning.
It is a hot dog stand. In all honesty, that is what (and nearly all) it is. A glorified hot dog stand. But the key word here is “glorified.” I must admit that for a lowly dispenser of frankfurters, it is an impressive establishment.
A giant hot dog is beached like a whale on the rooftop. It is made of painted wood and is surrounded by an entourage of painted figures in a painted landscape; by comets and peaks. The big sausage is the first thing one sees. It is visible for a mile around.
The yellow facade of the building—the architecture is in frontier style, including a tall false front—is polka-dotted with flat, silver, metallic weenies that borrow light from the elegant neon sign above and bend it into prismatic ripples. Apart from the luminous optical activity of the weenies, which is enjoyable in itself, the manner in which they are distributed over the rectilinear storefront bespeaks a stringent aesthetic that is fascinating to contemplate. What was the weenie-layer's compositional focus? What theory did he adhere to in arranging his modular elements (for that is what the weenies are) so that they would produce the degree of compositional interplay that they do? They seem almost musical in their arrangement. A symphony of silver sausages.
The windows—in front they are at ground level—are of colored glass: strange florid pictographs in which sausages turn into serpents and serpents turn into Arabic alphabets. Or are they Sanskirt?
The building and its parking lot nestle in a crescent of trees. The trees are fir mostly, although I can detect at least one Sitka spruce, a majestic fellow perhaps two hundred feet tall, spreading its tiers of boughs with weary precision. Protuding—no: gesturing!—from the front corners of the building, and at various angles to them, are plexuses of wooden and steel beams. Perhaps the beams exist to block curious customers from the private spaces in the rear of the roadhouse. Perhaps they are primarily decorative appendages. At any rate, these dense, dark, sheared or thronged traceries—horizontal totems, as it were—tug from both sides at the central facade, stretching it and extending it. If the edifice is radiant and joyful and contained in its weenie-spattered center, it is ragged and anxious and mysterious at its edges. Of the crisscrossed beams, some of the steel ones are embellishe
d with slender serpentine scrolls of violet neon; some of the wooden ones terminate in carved figureheads; owls, maidens, hippopotami.
Although it was still raining, and although I was anxious to get to a toilet where I could pump the cooling ointment into my rectum, I nevertheless stood for a while before this curiously glorified hot dog stand and made the observations that I have just recorded. The Zillers stood with me. Eventually, I said to John Paul, “Hmmmm,” I said, “I thought you had given up sculpture."
He bared his sharpened teeth as if he were of a mind to bite me, and stalked inside.
I should like to record some initial impressions of the Zillers. Perhaps I shall limit the impressions to physical descriptions for it is too soon to note anything significantly deep concerning their characters. Only if I remain faithful to a reasonably scientific procedure of investigation can I hope to arrive at a lasting interpretation of reality. I keep reminding myself of that fact, but in the secret shadows of my heart I become increasingly unsure of my ability to apply scientific methods to this inquest. Certainly where Amanda is concerned, cold formality is out of the question. Moreover, if I am honest with myself, I might consider the possibility that the time has long since passed (if, indeed, it ever existed) when I was in possession of a genuinely rational disposition. However, I am not altogether sure that that is the case. I have had my moments. On the other hand, were I impeccably objective in my methods (assuming that my motives are above reproach), would I even be present at this ridiculous hot dog stand? And under these circumstances?
Obviously, I am raked by doubts. It is goddamned confusing. But I intend to preserve, so let me get on with it.
How would I describe the Zillers were I a journalist reporting for a popular periodical? How could I describe them to my parents, to my former colleagues at the institute? The adjective that comes most effortlessly to mind is . . . no, no, that isn't fair. Such terms are too strong for Amanda and too mild for John Paul. For that matter, most adjectives in my repertoire are too mild for John Paul. This cowboy-rococo hot dog stand, this work of art masquerading as a roadside zoo, is presided over by a man so exotic in dress and demeanor that even if one were favorably disposed to him one still could not help but regard him as a poseur, an actor, a walking artifice. And at this early stage of the game I cannot pretend to be favorably disposed. Oh, I don't dislike Ziller. Not yet. He holds a definite fascination for me. Quite aside from his Tarzanesque trappings, his grass-hut head of hair, his loincloth, his leathers and jewels, he conveys an intensity of being that is impossible to ignore; it blasts out of his disquietingly immobile eyes in licorice rays, and no doubt would blast just as mightily were he attired in banker's garb. He did not acquire his reputation as sculptor and musician dishonestly, one feels. There is a compelling conviction that the man is charged with that peculiar facility that can wring poetry out of the most elusive aspects of life, although it is questionable if he is capable of giving that poetry the ring of authenticity.