Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

  Let me admit it: he is too rich for my blood. Too supercool. He comes on like the nihilistic gunfighter hero in one of those awful Italian westerns; the invulnerable paladin who shoots down everyone in sight and rides out of town with a smirk or a yawn.

  On those rare occasions when he breaks his haughty silence, his speech is so stilted one would swear he had written it out and memorized it in advance. He is at least six and a half feet tall and he seems to delight in deliberately towering over me as if he were some kind of god; jungle king, RKO Pictures, circa 1941. Of course, he has spent a lot of time in Africa. And Nearly Normal Jimmy vows that once when the Indo-Tibetan Circus was short of provisions, Ziller ran down a deer in the woods and slit its throat. And the following day he stood on the bank of a stream and snatched salmon out of the rapids with his bare hands. The day after that, the sound of his flute coaxed three pheasants into the cook pot. He backs up his unspoken boasts, damn him. What's more, he has just spent over a hundred dollars and a fair amount of time to get me, a stranger, out of jail. Maybe he wouldn't have done it had it not been for Amanda, but he did it. So, I'm going to give him every chance, I'm going to try to understand him—after all, he is one of the reasons I have taken my drastic steps of late—and I'm going to try to like him. But the truth is, friendship won't be easy with that self-styled Prince of Primitives. Not easy at all.

  Amanda, oh that's quite another matter. She was instantly likable, instantly lovable, instantly seductive, instantly the mistress of my marrow, the speeder in my pulse. Even John Paul could not describe Amanda, that is one thing he could not do. Nearly Normal Jimmy once described her as a “religion-unto-herself,” and I readily admit that there is something beatific about her gentleness, her poise, her radiant face, the way she seems to float several inches above the ground. However, if she is a saint it was a pope of gypsies who canonized her. My God! What colors she wears. Bangles and bracelets and beads. Rings on each finger, on every toe. Her dark hair appears singed by campfires and she moves always as if to music; her manner mixes action and dream.

  Like my own, her cheeks are chubby. Her features are more coarse than classical, but they are soaked with passion and grace. Her eyes shine as seeds in water do. Her mouth has triumphed over her front teeth, which are buckled like a derailed train. Far from distracting from her beauty, her crooked teeth cause her lips to protrude in a perpetual pout. Full and petulant, it is a mouth made for kissing and sucking; it pronounces her vowels as if they were fertility symbols, it sends men sliding helplessly over the arch of her Gene Tierney lisp.

  It is futile to go on describing her. I am no poet nor am I clever enough to explain why her teacup breasts are as prurient as those of the most bovine enchantress. Obviously, she has bewitched me (just as Nearly Normal warned she would) and for the moment I hope only that I do not completely lose my head.

  As for the Zillers as a couple, as for their manner of existence, a judgment now would not only be premature, it would reveal as much of me as of them. I could guess, of course, what the learned gentlemen at the Institute would say of them. Up to a point, I might concur. I am here no more to praise the Zillers than to bury them. I fear I have much to quarrel with them about. From what I know of their philosophy, it is gummy with romanticism, littered with mystic claptrap. Yet, if I did not believe them to be seminal figures, if I did not sense that today they practice a poetics that anticipates tomorrow's science, I scarcely would have set out with them toward . . . that which claims them for its own.

  My hosts have bedded me down in their living room on an accordion of vivid cushions and quilts. Should they decide to hire me, Amanda said, there are two rooms out back above the garage that I could furnish as I wish. A far cry from my stately suite at the Institute, but I await entry to those chambers with the eagerness of a bridegroom.

  The Zillers retired early to their sleeping quarters. Any lustful envy that I might have felt for John Paul has been blown out by the bleeding billows of my butt. Damn these hemorrhoids! They'll make me old before my time. As I lie here (on my stomach, of course), I detect laughter and music in their room. Candlelight is flickering—I can see it beneath their door—and heady incense is being burned. (Is their famous baboon in there?) They are playing phonograph records, some wild new jazz. Straining my ears just now I heard Amanda ask, “John Paul, is it true that Roland Kirk is the entire Count Basie orchestra in drag?"

  That concludes a series of observations from the notebook of Marx Marvelous. The author may quote further from the Marvelous journal at a later date, or he may not. In any event, he cautions the reader not to take these entries too seriously. They were transcribed at a time when Marx Marvelous was a trifle confused concerning both his mission and his methods, when he was vacillating between a stuffy academic outlook and one that was frivolous.

  Actually, such behavior was an old, old story for the guy. You see, Marx Marvelous was an exceptional young man, the kind who could easily have left his mark on the world. He had loads of brains, loads of talent, loads of class. But he was tainted by a whimsical ambivalence. Ambivalence hung about his neck like a half-plucked albatross. Ever since he was a whiz-kid eighth-grade physics pupil, Marx had dreamed of becoming a great theoretical scientist on the order of Werner Heisenberg or Einstein. Alas, dream as he did of golden achievement, he could not seem to take it seriously, neither the dreaming nor the doing. That is, he could take it seriously only up to a point, or he could take it seriously one week and the next week he could not.

  Simultaneously, he entertained a second set of dreams, dreams the author hesitates to detail lest they shame the dreamer. These other dreams were purple hummers. When they poked their snouts into the dry laboratory of his normal consciousness, Marx would find himself snickering in the middle of Kepler's most exquisite equations and scratching his groin when he should have been scratching his noggin. These dreams stood on pianos and shook hands backwards with Errol Flynn and hot-wired the dreamer's thyroid and drove it to Tijuana with the top down; gassy, sassy, crazy, lazy spectacles that bounced on the belly of his more rational ambitions and desecrated his sober instincts. Such was his second set of dreams. And the conflict had never been resolved. Up to now, the life of Marx Marvelous had been a compromise. He had failed both as a genius and as a rogue.

  Marvelous is still young and he has gone through many changes since arriving at the roadside zoo. There is hope for him yet. But his future is not really your interest or concern. Just make what you will of his early impressions of the Ziller phenomenon and let us march on to

  THE JOB INTERVIEW I

  The rain did not last through the night. Winter had made one final lunge and expired. Come morning, the sun was blaring and the air was very clear. As he shaved, Marx Marvelous could see from the bathroom window the sawtooth range of Cascade peaks as it jutted up and ran along behind the foothills on the eastern horizon. The Cascade Range looked as if it were a portrait gallery devoted exclusively to profiles of Dick Tracy. Here was Dick Tracy's chin pointed north and there was Dick Tracy's chin pointed south. There was Dick Tracy's jaw jutting down patronizingly at Junior and here was Dick Tracy's jaw jutting up obsequiously toward Diet Smith, and way over there was Dick Tracy's jaw jutting manfully straight ahead into the adoring gaze of Tess Trueheart. There was a battery of Dick Tracy noses sniffing the blue air for clues, and there was one very large Dick Tracy profile (Mt. Baker) that was covered all over with slobber and foam, as if Dick Tracy finally had gone insane from a lifetime of slaughtering deformed criminals (Pruneface, Rodent, Ugly Christine).

  Breakfast was served on a round oak table in the downstairs kitchen. There was poached salmon in hollandaise sauce, followed by fresh strawberries in wild honey. Tulips and daffodils by the dozens were bunched on the table. Recorded Japanese flute music spiraled down from the upstairs phonograph. Amanda had prepared everything after completing her morning meditations. After her vagina-strengthening exercises on the banks of the slough.

  Baby Thor a
nd Mon Cul were at table. Marx Marvelous blinked at the luminescence of the child's gaze; his eyes were like bare wires. He was both amused and flabbergasted by the baboon's antics, such as the way it juggled strawberries before devouring them, the way it scratched its pelt with a fork.

  Amanda chatted gaily with her son, tossing an occasional aside to her husband, to the baboon or to Marx Marvelous. She jabbered about seashell buddhas and sweet cream rainbows and about a proposed trip to the hills to hunt the morel (which Marvelous gathered was a species of mushroom). In contrast, John Paul said nothing. He sucked up his breakfast with manners that Marx found nearly as atrocious as the baboon's. Ziller ate everything with his fingers, including the berries in honey. To Marx, this seemed a disgusting display of contrived primitivism. He was about to say as much when Ziller suddenly asked, “Mr. Marvelous, do you think that anything exists between space and the wall?”

  It was the kind of question that made Marx Marvelous cringe, that offended him deep down in his bowels. Nevertheless, he was prepared. “Albert Einstein once defined space as 'love.' If that is an accurate definition, then we may conclude that if something could fit between love and its object, then something could fit between space and the wall.”

  “A pleasing answer, Mr. Marvelous. Amanda, you can continue the interview at your discretion.” With that, Ziller excused himself to a far corner of the kitchen where he commenced to unhook strings of sausages with the measured delight of a nymphomaniac plucking fruits from her dream vine.

  II

  First letting Thor and Mon Cul out in the back grove to play, Amanda took the prospective employee on a tour of the premises. In one sun-splashed end of what had formerly been Mom's dining room, there was a rock pile enclosed by wire mesh. Amanda studied Marx's face to see if he was repulsed by the occupants of the pen. “We take good care of these dears,” confided Amanda. “There are fewer than one hundred left alive and we're fortunate to have so many here in our charge.”

  Marx Marvelous tried to tally the exact number of San Francisco garter snakes in the enclosure, but as they were forever slithering in and out among the rocks, over the rocks and over one another, it was impossible to take a precise census. He guessed there were twelve to fifteen. “They seem pretty frisky to be on the brink of extinction,” he said.

  The flea circus was housed inside a hollow, lighted table, the top of which was magnifying glass. Marx Marvelous could not conceal fascination. The fleas were en costume, some dressed as ballerinas and some as Roman warriors; there was a clown or two and a Persian prince and a cowboy and one flea wore a scarlet chiffon sheath and a yellow wig and looked a little like Jean Harlow. Tiny props were stashed in a corner beneath a miniature canopy. “The fleas are my pride and joy—I trained them and sewed their costumes—but they are also our biggest headache,” said Amanda. “They require an attendant almost full time because most of the tourists insist on seeing them perform. I can't say as I blame the tourists, but it's a hardship to keep staging shows. As it is, we schedule a chariot race once an hour on busy days, but folks complain if they have to wait. I don't have time to demonstrate right now, but we put the fleas through their paces by blowing smoke at them. It isn't hard, really. With just a little practice you'll become a good flea trainer, wait and see.”

  Marx Marvelous laughed out loud. “Me, a flea trainer. What would they say at the Institute?”

  “The Institute?” asked Amanda.

  “Er, well, yes, I was formerly employed by an institution. The, er, East River Institute to be exact.”

  The name meant nothing to Amanda. “I hope it was fun for you,” she said. She led her guest over to a dramatically lighted alcove in which the amber encapsuled tsetse fly rested upon a satin pillow. It was here, with candlelight reflecting from the green igloo eye facets of the killer insect, that Amanda chose to conduct her portion of the job interview.

  “Are you scared of snakes?” First question.

  “No, hardly a bit. I used to capture live Maryland copperheads for my zoology class workshop in herpetology.”

  “Can you make change?” Second question.

  “I've had twenty-one hours of college mathematics. I think I could change a dollar. Or even a fiver.”

  Third question. “Could you, do you suppose, endure selling frankfurters to passing motorists and catering to the whims of summer vacationers?”

  “I've been informed by the Institute's resident psychologist that I have a masochistic streak a mile wide. I trust that is of sufficient width to qualify me as a servant of tourists.”

  “Then I guess that's all I need to know.”

  “You mean, Amanda, that you would hire me on the basis of your current knowledge of me?”

  “Why not? You've met the qualifications. What's more, I like you. You have an honest face.” (And an intrusive bulge in your checkered trousers, she thought secretly.) “Besides, I consulted the I Ching about you early this morning. I threw the yarrow stalks and got the hexagram Ts'ui or Gathering Together. In the Ts'ui hexagram the Lake image is above the Earth image; the Lake threatens to overflow, signifying that danger is connected with gathering together. However, Ts'ui is, on the whole, a joyful judgment, as it is good fortune for strong people to gather together in devotion. I take that hexagram to mean that despite an element of peril, it will be rewarding for all of us if you gather with us here. Don't you interpret it that way?”

  Marx Marvelous frowned like the gargoyle that hated Notre Dame. “I'm afraid I put damn little faith in Chinese superstitions,” he said. “I wouldn't hire a shit-picker on the basis of the I Ching or whatever that book of magic spells is called, and I wouldn't expect to be hired as manager of your business on that authority either.”

  Amanda was taken aback. “Oh my,” she said. “I had no idea you felt like that. Since you are a friend of Nearly Normal Jimmy's, I assumed you were versed, or at least interested, in . . . that knowledge that lies outside the empirical playpen.”

  “Like most of our young mystics, when Nearly Normal Jimmy starts talking philosophy he sounds like a cross between Norman Vincent Peale and a fortune cookie. And from what I've heard of your pronouncements, you don't come off much better. Empirical playpen, my ass.” Marx Marvelous checked his temper and tried to sugar his frown. “I don't mean to offend you, really I don't. But I'm a scientist—of sorts—and concerned—up to a point—with solving humanity's problems. So I get kinda hot when otherwise intelligent people start handing me answers to these problems that sound like naive mishmashes of yoga, Theosophy, vegetarianism, zen, primitive Christianity, flying saucerism and the Ouija board.”

  “I haven't handed you anything, Marx Marvelous.” She said it pleasantly, even seductively. When she moved, her cupcake breasts bounced in her spangled sleeveless pullover, her mouth was as moist as an orchid. “Solving humanity's problems is not my line of work. However, if you find a conflict in science and mysticism, may I suggest that you do not deny the latter the objectivity you grant the former. Professor Carl Jung was one great scientist who found the I Ching to be a time-tested, hard-nosed, fully practical application of the laws of chance. Scientists, I suspect, operate on chance more often than they'd care to have us laymen discover. If you are as honest as I think you are, you will admit to me sooner or later that you play hunches, too.”

  The prospective zoo manager and weenie salesman shrugged. This was precisely the kind of discussion that he had hoped to avoid or at least to delay. He did not know where to go from here. Except to bed. God, but Amanda was a yummy! Marx imagined that if he kept real still, he could hear sexuality working in her like bees in a hive. On the other hand, the bleating of his hemorrhoids probably would have obscured her sultry buzz.

  “Look,” he said at last, “I appreciate very much you finding me so readily acceptable. If a three-thousand-year-old Chinese oracle has contributed to your opinion of me, I guess I should be grateful. I do want the job very much and if you are offering it, I accept.”

  “Marx
Marvelous,” she said with deliberation, “first tell me this. What kind of scientist are you that you want to sell hot dogs and help run a flea circus? Is there a new branch of science that requires internship in roadside zoos?”

  “I'm not interested in just any roadside zoo. I want to work in this roadside zoo.”

  “But why?”

  “Oh hell,” Marvelous sighed. “I was afraid this interview was going too smoothly. Is my employment dependent upon my reply?”

  “No, indeed,” Amanda assured him. “As far as I'm concerned, you are hired. You don't have to reply if you don't want to. I'm just curious, that's all. If you really are a professional scientist who had a good job with some institution, why did you come here, why have you sought us out? Yes, I'm curious.”