by Tom Robbins
Outside of Concrete, boys have thrown crab apples through the colored glass windows of an abandoned church. Crows carry the bright fragments away to their nests.
On the Freeway south of Mount Vernon, watched over by a hovering sausage, surrounded by a ring of prophecy, an audacious roadside zoo rages against the multiplying green damp chill as if it were a spell cast upon the valley by gypsy friends of the sun. Events transpire within that zoo which must be recorded immediately and correctly if they are to pass into history undeformed. Things rot with a terrible swiftness in the Northwest rains. A century from now, the ruins of the Capt. Kendrick Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Preserve will offer precious little to reimburse archaeologists for their time. No Dead Sea Scrolls will ever be found in the Skagit Valley. It's now or never for this bible.
THE SECOND COMING
The Second Coming did not quite come off as advertised. The heavens opened, sure enough, but only to let a fine pearly rain streak through to spray the valley. Instead of celestial choirs, there were trucks snorting on the Freeway. Instead of Gabriel's trumpet there was John Paul Ziller's flute. Jesus himself showed up disguised as a pop art sculpture, caked with plaster from head to toe. And contrary to advance publicity, he was in no better shape upon his return than he was at his departure. He was, in fact, dead as a boot.
But, reader, do not let this fact escape you: it was him all right. Stretched out in the pantry of the Zillers' roadside zoo was none other than the Son of God, the Son of Man, the Prince of Peace, the Good Shepherd, the Blessed Saviour, the Master, the Messiah, the Light of the World, Our Lord, Jesus Christ, the scandal of history.
"It has recently come to my attention,” said Plucky Purcell, “that Charles IV (Charles the Bland) once said that life is a pickle factory. I cannot accept that, as I find it impossible to determine whether life is sweet or sour."
“Perhaps,” said Amanda, purring as Purcell nibbled her tattoos, “you would prefer the words of Ba Ba of Bow Wow who claims that life is a fortune cookie in which someone forgot to put the fortune.”
And that, reader, pity me, is what I returned to. First off, there was Jesus Christ, the most vertical figure in history, lying (quite horizontal) in the pantry of our roadside attraction. That is, his mummified corpse was lying there, but in the case of Jesus as in the case of no other historical figure, coming upon him dead was even more extraordinary than coming upon him breathing. (What an electric heater perched on the rim of the Bathtub of the World that dead Jesus was!) Secondly, and some readers will find it shocking that I could list this second event in such easy proximity to the first, as if the second were of only slightly less magnitude than the first—secondly, there was Amanda and Plucky in the midst of a marathon embrace, their love-red ears tuned in only to each slish and slurp, oblivious to the fanfare of slamming doors that had accompanied my return to the zoo and oblivious, too, to the blast of silent waves that emanated earth-round from that mummy in the downstairs closet, although Amanda later claimed that she had taken Purcell to bed chiefly to get his mind off the Corpse, the presence of which was shoving him toward nuthood. Speaking of madness, I confess it was a close companion to me, too, those first days back at the roadhouse (some folks might believe it visits me still), but nobody rushed me off to the sack, I'll have you know.
Here, the reader has probably noticed that the author has begun to write in the first person singular, and he may have thought, ah ha, the autobiographical first person singular is always the choice of men in trouble, whereas only those writers who are safely disengaged from their subjects may indulge in third person motifs or that most cowardly of all voices, the first person plural—the pompous and devious editorial we. Actually, I have slipped into first person singular on several occasions during the drafting of this report, but always I went back and corrected the oversight. You see, it had been my intention to serve up this report as a strip of lean, rare meat ungarnished by the sauces of my own personality. What has become increasingly apparent, however, is that I am irreversibly enmeshed in the events this document will henceforth describe, so even had I time to restore a third-person treatment to the preceding paragraph (and time is growing precious) it could serve no honorable purpose. It might as well be known here and now that it is I, Marx Marvelous, who is your host and narrator at this most anticipated of all encores, the second appearance of you know who.
Your host and narrator, yes indeed, and I excuse you if you are thinking that of all the persons upon this planet to whom might have fallen the chore of witnessing the Advent (or, more correctly, the prelude to the Advent, for even as I type these words the returned Christ might be revealing himself to the cameras on some strip of Florida sand where heretofore only citrus cuties in bikinis may have posed—and can the shock of world recognition be far behind?), why must it have fallen to this admittedly ambivalent boy scientist to whom the true and powerful workings of language remain a puzzle. No more than an amateur plumber can deny the deepening mess on the bathroom floor can I deny the broken pace of this manuscript, its contradictions, its vagueness, its digressions, its—oh my—its thousand and one shifts in style. As for those stylistic inconsistencies, Amanda told me once that it is the natural state of Cancerians to be easily and tellingly influenced, to let the styles of others rub off on them at will, so if the reader is zodiacally oriented (and I maintain that I am not) perhaps the disclosure that I am Cancer-born will lift me off the hook. Of course, an astrological excuse will never suffice for literary critics or professors of English, but they've no damned business with their snouts in a document like this one anyway.
At any rate, I am indeed impressionable and thus parts of my report turn out written in John Paul Ziller's idiom, parts in Plucky Purcell's idiom and parts in the idiom of the young mistress of the zoo (can you pick out those parts where each holds sway?). And there are times when everybody talks alike and that is like a smart-assed doctor of philosophy candidate at Johns Hopkins U. Oh well. I cannot apologize. Granted the literary atrocities (will I be tried and hung at some future Nuremberg for writers?) still I rejoice that it was I and not some super-journalist with eighty million words on his speedometer who drew the task of describing the apocalypse (it makes me shudder to conceive of Another Roadside Attraction as The Day Christ Came Back). And I am gleeful, too, that it was I who drew the task instead of a biblical scholar or instead of one of our bright young novelists, even, for although they, any one of them, might have brought to the historic task skills and insights beyond my command, I greatly fear that they would have been so thunderstruck by the presence of Our Lord, dead and plaster-soiled, that they would have neglected the girl; the girl: Amanda.
Once, a famous European dilettante visited Amanda's town. The dilettante lectured to the Davy Crockett Fine Arts and Hot Lemonade Society. It was a warm evening in early summer. Amanda's father, enormously fat in a white linen suit, took his thirteen-year-old daughter to the talk. The lecture was given in the high-school gym. Father and daughter sat in the front row.
Amanda, in a dainty pink organdy dress with a yellow sash, was perhaps the only member of the audience who did not sweat profusely on this cultural pilgrimage.
The dilettante must have noticed for the following day he called upon Amanda's father at his greenhouse and requested permission to paint the young girl's portrait. The father was honored. Amanda posed in a wicker chair, but the dilettante painted her rising from behind a cloud. The picture pleased Amanda. She agreed to go walking the fields with the dilettante to learn more of art and European culture.
The lesson, as it turned out, had a familiar ring. Amanda, girlishly thirsty for knowledge, was not certain she was learning anything new at all. All at once, however, she saw—fluttering forward without flaw along its own organic line—a most magnificent Arizona swallowtail. “All problems of art are solved,” she thought, for she had found the “line of beauty” in the bumpy line of moth flight. She sprang to her feet and chased after the butterfly while the dilettante s
tamped and kicked, and shouted at the insect a term which Amanda could not understand, although knowing the dilettante she was certain it was a phrase of a scholarly nature. In fact, years passed before Amanda learned that “coitus interruptus” was not the scientific name for the swallowtail butterfly.
In the evenings, after the zoo had closed, Amanda liked to sit beside the slough and listen to the frogs. Listening to the frogs was like turning the pages of an expensive coffeetable book on Moorish architecture. Each time she turned a page she was met by another mosaic of stupefying density.
“To hear you tell it,” said one of her friends, “you'd think the frogs invented algebra.”
“Well,” said Amanda, turning the loaded pages, “a pollywog is more than a monowog.”
Amanda always brushed her teeth with crushed strawberries. The strawberries pulp whitened her teeth and pinkened her gums.
When death finally sucks her down the drain, as it must suck everyone, Amanda will leave an iridescent ring around the tub.
There were no mail-order catalogues in 1492. Marco Polo's journal was the wish book of Renaissance Europe. Then, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and landed in Sears' basement. Despite all the Indians on the escalator, Columbus' visit came to be known as a “discovery."
The “discovery” of the body of Jesus Christ is also a story of plunder. By all rights, it is Plucky Purcell's story and I wish that he were here to tell it. There is no way that I can articulate that little episode and make it sound credible, the way I could make, say, the discovery of the fourth-demensional spin of electrons sound credible, for the mind that directs my typing fingers, nurtured as it was in the safe, sane laboratories of Johns Hopkins University, is not suited to describing quirks in what I have been taught is a rational world. I damn such quirks and wish them the bad luck I wish yogis and astrologers and others who claim to see things in the sky that I and my telescope cannot. In Purcell's mind, on the other hand, reality rushes by like a wild white river, while quirks, like crocodiles or iguanas, sun themselves in grotesque comfort on the shores. Unfortunately, the Pluck penned no letters concerning his discovery (there just wasn't time for that) from which I might quote, and at the moment he is rather occupied with eluding the dragnets of CIA and FBI, not to mention playing his role in whatever worthy plan the magician might have conceived for the Corpse. So, I myself will assume the responsibility of relating how Jesus was found and—dammit, folks, this time I really mean it—I will do it as quickly and simply as possible. Listen.
As most of you recall, there was a fairly severe geological disturbance in Italy on September 27 of this year. The volcano Vesuvius erupted, killing livestock in its immediate vicinity and causing widespread damage to crops. A small tidal wave wrecked boats in the Neopolitan area. And twenty-five or thirty tremors, most of them mild, were felt up and down the Italian boot. The most severe of the earthquakes, although in terms of death and destruction it could hardly be called a catastrophe, was centered in Vatican City. Surely you remember. Windows were smashed, the facades of some buildings were cracked and in Saint Peter's Square a small section of pavement buckled. On the whole, however, damage was light—above ground. But beneath the Vatican proper, the catacombs took a beating. Vast sections of them were harmed. That much you learned from your newspaper and your TV. There was quite a fuss about it on September 28, remember, but journalism is as fickle as a young actress and by the twenty-ninth it was a story the large papers carried deep in their rear sections and the small papers carried not at all. Who, after all, can sustain interest in damaged catacombs in times like these?
There were a dozen injuries in the Vatican tremor, but no deaths, and the only phase of it that provoked conversation around breakfast tables and water coolers in America was the disclosure that its unruly vibrations had bounced His Holiness out of bed. If the papal posterior was bruised in the bouncing the Vatican did not share with the public that intimacy, and thus the incident quickly slipped beneath the sea of reportable events that lap each evening at the feet of the six o'clock news. The caved-in tunnels, the broken art and artifacts, were subjects which only the Vatican paper and some Catholic magazines examined in any great detail. The primary effects of the Vatican quake could hardly, to repeat myself, be called a catastrophe. The secondary effects were something else again. The world has not yet been informed of those secondary effects.
When the earthquake hit, Plucky Purcell—like the Pope—was dreaming. Nearly Normal Jimmy once advanced the theory that it was impossible for the man who awakens in the morning to know with certainty that he is the same man who went to sleep at night. Nearly Normal became rather obsessed with that notion and as a result developed insomnia. Amanda thought the whole thing was silly. Said she, “What difference does it make who you are when you wake up as long as you wake up somebody.” Like the oft-quoted Chinese philosopher, she would have been content to wake up a butterfly. But Nearly Normal Jimmy rested no easier and finally, on the advice of Ziller, called upon a magi who lived in a pyramid in Illinois and had his psyche tattooed. With a small brand inked into the skin of his mind, he could roam far and wide while sleeping and yet always keep tabs on himself. He had belled the cat of his consciousness, so to speak. However, there was one drawback. From the day he was tattooed, Nearly Normal always had the same dream. The only image that ever came to him in dreaming was the image of his tattoo: a leather armchair of the Tibetan variety. It was an image to which Jimmy was attracted, to be sure, but it made for dull hours a-dreaming.
Purcell never had that problem. Whether he lay on a jail bunk, on a motel mattress soaked with sex or on a monk's stingy cot, he slumbered like an old dog and his dreams were as rich and varied as the total output of Hollywood from Birth of a Nation until now. “Colossal” is an adjective that could be applied to Purcell's dreams. “I gotta dream spectaculars,” he said, “or someone else will dream them in my place.” The Vatican earthquake shook Purcell loose from one level of spectacle and deposited him on another. The air he awoke in was choked with dust and rent with screams. Of the twelve persons who were hurt in the quake, seven acquired their injuries not two hundred feet from where Plucky lay dreaming. That boy has a knack for being in the thick of things.
Panic moved through the catacombs like a compulsive housekeeper, emptying the ashtrays of reason and mopping up the tracks of experience. The catacombs took on an insect quality. Confusion spun in the debris. But while the others who roomed in the catacombs—the several score underground soldiers of the cross—while they tried in panic to make up their minds whether to run for the ground-level exit before or after gathering up their possessions, before or after ministering to their wounded comrades, impulsive Plucky Purcell not only chose an immediate course of action, he made a long-term decision concerning his future as well. It was a decision that was to affect the destiny of the race, although Purcell could not have known that then.
In Bokonon, it is written that “peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”
One two three and four-ah. One two three and four-ah. Fast and funny were the steps Purcell took down the rumbling corridor. Purcell was not so much running as he was dancing and he was not so much dancing as he was laughing with his feet. One two three and ha-ha. He moved not toward the stairs that led to the surface but toward those which led to the next lower level of catacombs. As he moved (hop skip wiggle) through the crumbled stone and fearful echoes, his brainpan sizzled with visions: visions of autumn in New York; visions of San Francisco's doll-faced hills; visions of the wonders of Mexican agriculture; visions of studio doors flung open in welcome; visions of burning herbs and young pussy both in such profusion that his heart sickened and flopped like a musical dove in the odors that the visions brought to his nostrils. Visions of big escape, of throwing off that Catholic curse which for more than a year now had held him in its coils and sent him probing closer and closer to the dark dangerous heart of the One True Church, taunting him with religious riddles until he—on
ce happy-go-lucky hustler—could think of little else but finding some way to cope with an immense and growing world-force that twinkled so tenderly of Heaven and stunk so terribly of Hell. Without consciously intending to, he had hacked into the Roman mysteries as a safari hacks into dense jungle, and he had come down with velvet fevers and been bedeviled by such opulent deliriums that he no longer knew if the evil he saw was actually there or whether his sickness conjured it. Now, like a schizophrenic suddenly made whole, like a harried lover at last emotionally free of the bitch he thought he could not bear to lose, Purcell had awakened from his long Catholic nightmare—shaken from it by an actual seizure of the earth—and the visions that unfolded in his mind were familiar ones of a secular life he could barely wait to resume. Feet laughing beneath him, he approached the treasure vaults. Gold and silver are heavy cargo, but even though he knew he could stuff no more than a few thousand dollars' worth into his belongings, it would get him to America and friends and dope and pussy and . . . However much he plundered it was scant payment for the horrors religion had put him through. He danced over a body. No, it was a toppled statue of a Grecian athlete; its censoring Roman fig leaf had broken away in the fall and now its marble penis pointed at the stars and freedom; dance on, Purcell. One two three and ha-ha.
Oh my. Whew! You waltz divinely, Pluck. Just as our hero had anticipated, several of the chambers lay open, their barred doorways bent and sprung or their stone walls reduced to rubble. It took Purcell not many minutes to add substantially to the net worth of his estate. “This is the business the Church should have been about all along,” he thought. “Sharing its gold with the poor instead of its condolences.” Heavier by a good twenty pounds, he nevertheless executed a graceful pirouette and prepared to make his exit. But his choreographer had altered the pattern.