The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  “But you can’t see him,” giggled she.

  “No? And why not?”

  “Because you don’t have any dandelions.”

  She proffered her prized bouquet. I accepted the dirty weeds and headed up the stairs. I knocked, and though I could hear voices, no one answered.

  “Just go in,” called the girl. “There aren’t any rules here.”

  A silkscreen of a man and woman in carnal embrace greeted me. The hum (I guessed it to be an orgy) originated from my left, and I passed through a hallway scattered with artifacts of dubious utility, from a feather-rimmed tambourine to a poster of a homely, jug-eared boy above the slogan WHAT, ME WORRY?

  The living room was occupied by five young people cross-legged upon a wine-stained rug, eyes shut, wrists suspended as if from wire, and chanting “Om” over the sitar sounds of a band an LP cover identified as the Yardbirds. The poor meditators had been hit by a tornado of ghastly fashions. Their clothing was more unkempt than that of the nymph, and all of them, even the girls, were clad like cowpokes in dungarees. I evaluated my latest ensemble of single-breasted slubbed-silk suit, tapered trousers, and square-toed leather step-ins, and rather missed the snappily dressed Nation of Islam.

  But where else had I to run? I tapped the record player with my toe, and the needle skipped to the silent center. Gradually the om-ing abated. Ten eyes fluttered open. I tossed the dandelions onto a spot between their knees as in medieval times I might have tossed a slain bear.

  “I have come,” proclaimed I, “to assist you in your cause.”

  They blinked at the bouquet, knuckled their eyes, and yawned.

  “Right on,” said a girl. “Which cause?”

  Why must everyone badger me with particulars? I surveyed the room for clues. Through the cloud of cobalt smoke, I made out scattered titles from the books piled floor-to-window, but they were words I did not understand: Siddhartha, Steppenwolf, Dharma Bums, Ashtanga Yoga. Tacked onto the wall, however, was an image I knew: Marlon Brando, leathered and astride a motorcycle, from a film called The Wild One I’d watched on Mrs. White’s Zenith. Brando had a good quip in that picture, and, feeling desperate, I appropriated it, hoping I could pull off the actor’s jaded detachment. What was my cause, they asked?

  “Whaddya got?”

  One of the meditators snorted. He brushed incense ash from his jeans and stood. He was freckled, wide-sideburned, an inch taller than I (ineligible for Project Mercury, Rigby would have pointed out), and topped with a globe of hennaed hair pushed to absurd heights by a red bandana. He held out a hand for me to shake, except with his forearm cocked upward and his hand open as if inviting me to arm wrestle. I made the awkward fit, and he gave our fist-lock a shake.

  He gestured with his head—his ball of hair waggled—and walked through another disheveled corridor before entering a room reassuring for its desk, table, and file cabinets. He lit a joint and inhaled. He spoke while suppressing the smoke.

  “So you met Janice. Far-out chick, huh?”

  “She wasn’t that far out. Only the front yard.”

  He continued to hold the inhale.

  “So lay it on me, brother. What’s your name?”

  “Zebulon X.”

  “Harvey Scheinberg.” He exhaled and held out the joint. “You want a hit?”

  I gestured at the gash in my neck. Scheinberg whistled.

  “The Man fucked you up good, huh?”

  This Man again! Who was this unfriendly phantom?

  “What slot he stick you in?” asked Scheinberg.

  “Slot?”

  “You know, man. Army, Navy, what?”

  Oh-ho! The Man was the government! I’d suss this slang yet!

  “Marine Corps,” replied I. Decades after the fact, the words spilled like blood, my frigid tongue warmed by memories of Church, the deluge of death, the eked survival of a contemptible species. “Seventh Regiment, Third Battalion.”

  Scheinberg slapped a sloppy stack of folders.

  “We had two Marines in last week. You wouldn’t believe the shit they said. Or maybe you would. I’m talking atrocities miles past any Geneva Convention bullshit. And not from NVA or VC either. I’m talking American grunts skinning rice farmers alive. Vietnamese women being raped by whole platoons. ‘Ears for beers’—you bring back the most enemy ears, the other squad buys the beer. It was SOP, man, Standard Operating Procedure. They learned it in murder training—that’s what I call boot camp—and now it’s all up in their wiring. Really bummed me out. You see any of that kind of shit over there?”

  “Yes,” lied I. “It, ah, bummed me out as well.”

  He flapped the smoke aside to better see me.

  “Zebulon X, huh? Didn’t you work with the SCLC? Or the NAACP?”

  Fie, acronyms, fie! I tendered a noncommittal shrug.

  “Didn’t know you were white,” mused he. “Or a vet.”

  Harvey Scheinberg might have overindulged in grass, but when he focused his eyes, they gleamed like those of a shrewd plumber eager to dismantle a rusty lattice of outdated pipes. He scrutinized my straight-laced suit as well as my hairstyle, trapped forever in an 1890s crop instead of the Beatles-inspired shag favored by every other male in the house.

  “You for real, man?”

  I sputtered my best scoff. “Real? Why, I am the realest!”

  “Yeah? I’m picking up weird vibes.”

  Scheinberg snapped forward in his chair. “Tell me who Willie Pete is.”

  Iron bars clamped down over the windows and doors. The jig was up! Willie Pete, thought I, my mind whirling, might be an important Marine Corps general, or perhaps a soldier who sacrificed his life for his squad, or maybe a member of the Yardbirds. Ever the gambler, I was willing to make a wild guess, but my hesitation damned me.

  “White phosphorus, man!” cried Scheinberg. “You’re telling me you were in the Corps and you don’t know what phosphorus is?”

  “I . . . We didn’t . . .”

  Scheinberg adored being the smartest chap in the room, that much was clear. He laughed, leaned back, plopped his bare feet atop the table, centered his ashtray on his stomach, and took a derisive tone.

  “Well, let me lay some heavy-duty facts on you, man. White phosphorus, Willie Pete, is a nifty little cocktail your Marine Corps buddies are exploding inside Vietcong tunnels, and what it does, man, is burn up all the oxygen and smoke them out. But what’s really groovy about it is it burns up clothes and skin pretty good too. Except what I hear, from Marines, man, actual real-life Marines, is it’s not just the VC getting to know Willie Pete. It’s innocent people, whole villages, children running around with their skin peeling off.” Scheinberg pointed his joint at me—he was having a blast! “You’re an infiltrator, aren’t you? Republican peckerwood. I should’ve known by the monkey suit and company-man haircut.”

  That was far enough. I worked for no man—including the Man.

  I bashed my fist to the table. A file folder jumped.

  “Look here, Muttonchops! It is true that the majority of my injuries are nonmilitary in origin. That I admit. But I am Zebulon X and I can provide character endorsements and I will be of use to the NSTF, if only you desist this pointless cat-and-mouse!”

  Scheinberg scrubbed fingers through facial hair and studied me.

  “Fine, let’s rap. Basic shit. You dig what’s going on in Vietnam, right?”

  Truth be told, I lived in perplexity over how an insignificant Indochinese nation could act as a breaking wheel upon which the United States was stretched. All that said, I’d spied my share of sloganeering and so gave one of them a test.

  “‘Better to Fight Communism on the Mekong Than the Mississippi.’”

  “‘Better Saigon Than San Diego,’” chanted Scheinberg. “C-minus, man. Here, let me simplify: North Vietnam bad, South Vietnam good. It’s called Domino Theory. One Asian country goes Red, then the next, and the next, and suddenly they’re in Honolulu, they’re in San Francisco.”

  “
Ah. Yes. A theory most sound!”

  “What? No, man! Where’s your head? That’s the bullshit they’re feeding us. You really think we ought to be escalating this shit? Bring in Russia, bring in China, get atomic?”

  Scheinberg tossed his spliff and leapt to his feet. The Zen master of the living room had vanished, and now he jabbed fingers at me, at the earth beneath his feet, at the world outside our window.

  “But that’s just what we’re doing, man. They’re about to double the draft. Double it. We’ll have two hundred thousand troops in Nam by New Year’s, and we still haven’t declared war. Did you know that? We’re all living in LBJ’s fantasy-land. Is this Alice in Wonderland? Eat this cake, we’ll get smaller? Eat that one, we’ll get bigger? No, man, it’s just time to stop eating cake! We need to settle with Ho Chi Minh, get our troops out, and get hip to what’s going on here in America. That’s what the NSTF is all about, man. We want to pull this country’s lips off the three-titted beast of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost: one, backward-thinking higher ed; two, minority-abusing big business; and three, the goddamn child-killing, woman-raping, nature-destroying federal fucking government!”

  From the meditation room, wild applause. Scheinberg’s face had gone the color of his bandana, but instead of him looking foolish, I found him to be rather warriorlike; it was easy to envision him taking a fire-hose to the chin without shrinking, even as his hedge of hair soddened and sank. He panted and stared, waiting for a reply by which to reckon my merit.

  Eons ago, the Astonishing Mr. Stick saved himself from the Barker by drawing from the archive of quotes he’d absorbed during his school years. One such quote came to me now, and before I spoke it, I acknowledged its source—our sixth president, John Quincy Adams, the namesake of bootlegger John Quincy, who, I had to imagine, would have been a protestor far quieter but every bit as fearless as this Harvey Scheinberg.

  “‘America does not go abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all.’”

  A sly smile softened Scheinberg’s face. He gave a chuckle. “That noose around your neck. That’s a great gimmick.”

  He moved to an open trunk and began rifling through it.

  “Some martyr act, right? That’s your bit?”

  So impressed had I become with this fellow’s grasp of politics that I felt an inferior’s sudden need to justify his own work.

  “The history of martyrs,” crowed I, “goes hand-in-hand with struggles of the oppressed. Why do martyrs die? Because they hold views that those in power—the Man, if you like—consider disruptive. Take, for instance, Mary, Queen of England, the infamous Bloody Mary, so allegiant to the Pope that she overturned her father’s reformations and executed—”

  Scheinberg patted the air, tamping my embers before they could ignite.

  “Look, man, Zebulon X, whatever, I’m so stoned, I can barely dig what you’re saying. I surrender, all right? One thing NSTF always needs is bodies. Think you can be ready tomorrow?”

  He tossed the object he’d fished from the trunk across the room. I caught it against my chest with my arm. It was a bright yellow hard hat, the sort favored by construction workers. It had come up against the Man before; its surface was scuffed and dented. Experimentally, I placed it upon my head. It was no Knapp-Felt fedora of my Roaring Twenties, yet I found that it straightened my spine. The helmet, to put it simply, had weight.

  “Good, it fits,” said Scheinberg. “You’re gonna need it.”

  IV.

  IF YOU’VE SPENT TIME ON this planet, Dearest Reader, your ears perk up the second you hear the bass line (bom, bom, bom, bom-bom bom-bom), after one lap joined by jingle-bells (zhing, zhing, zhing, zhing-zhing, zhing-zhing), until the big brass blurt (BOMP) gets you tapping your toe (BOMP), even if yours has been chewed up (BOMP) by a Saint Bernard (BOMP), because now you’re anticipating the teasing backbeat (cracka-cracka) which means the voice (cracka-cracka), that crystal croon of folksy soulfulness (cracka-cracka), is about to begin.

  Old Mr. Finch, he swung low from a tree

  But he stood back up, just as fine as one can be. We said . . .

  “Hey, Mr. Finch, how ’bout you rest your weary head?”

  But he only smiled and laughed, “I got bigger plans instead, instead, instead—”

  The first time I heard it warble from the transistor radio of a student demonstrator, I picked up the battery-operated gadget (the owner was busy “making out” with his girl) and absconded about the sidewalks of the university’s quad, speaker to my ear, sputtering with incredulity, my energetic canter making the noose about my neck frolic like a horse’s tail. Was this deliriously catchy song about me? Why, it had to be!

  Old Mr. Finch (ooh-ooh),

  How many roads will you walk? (ooh-ooh)

  No bullet or rope or club, man (yeah, yeah)

  Will keep him from another drop (yeah, yeah)

  Because Old Mr. Finch keeps ramblin’ on . . .

  After the last chorus concluded with an artillery of hand claps loud enough to distort the radio, the DJ identified the group as the Beau-Ts, presented by a label called Motown, and noted that the tune had just broken the Billboard Hot 100. So desperately did I require more information that I resigned myself to the awkward transaction of buying a copy of Ebony magazine, which promised, beneath a big photo of Negro lovebirds Diahann Carroll and Sidney Poitier, an article titled “CAN ANYTHING STOP THE MOTOWN HIT MACHINE?”

  The Beau-Ts merited a single paragraph, in which they were described as a trio of childhood friends whose first single, “The Ballad of Old Mr. Finch,” was, at press time, inching up the pop charts. Said Motown honcho Berry Gordy, the Beau-Ts had every bit the talent—and photogenic figures!—of top girl groups like the Vandellas and the Supremes. Why “the Beau-Ts?” Easy, said Gordy. The title came from their alliterative surnames: Miss Linda Triplett, Miss Debra Toney, and the baby of the group, Little Miss Bunny Tucker.

  The strutting shrimp had made it big! Bunny’s lead vocal on “The Ballad of Old Mr. Finch” was indisputable; not two years had passed since Biloxi. I was flabbergasted, though, by the stamp-sized photograph of the Beau-Ts worked into a Motown collage. With her bell-shaped wig, fake eyelashes, caked makeup, and shimmering gown (all matched by her bandmates), Bunny looked a decade older than the scrawny preteen I recalled.

  Too bad for me, NSTF altruists were incurious when it came to anything outside their pursuit of egalitarian rights, and that included music lacking overt antiwar content. I might have broken down and bragged about my musical renown if Scheinberg hadn’t hurried me out of state to prove myself at a packed schedule of sit-ins, teach-ins, and be-ins. (Sorry, Reader, I can’t explain that last one.) Most originated at tumbledown communes where nymphs similar to Janice gathered crops from sickly organic gardens while male counterparts plucked guitars and praised the girls’ groovy energy before running their hands up the girls’ legs and asking if they wanted to go “turn on.”

  Who was there for societal progress and who was there for the sexual smorgasbord was beyond the purview of a Better God, no matter how wild I was driven by all of the exposed flesh engaging in acts I hadn’t enjoyed since Wilma Sue. A Better God, I told myself, only cared that the predominantly white NSTF drew crowds by the hundreds. Frenzied by Scheinberg’s hot-tempered tirades, provoked by pugnacious police, and emotionally emancipated by opiates and hallucinogens, the faithful were quite obliging in helping me pull off public deaths that, with soberer eyes, might have felt to them like murder. They dug my act. By reminding them of the war’s high stakes, my offings seemed to inspire to higher volumes both their chants and their word-of-mouth appreciation.

  In Bloomington, Indiana, I was dragged by a horse like the martyr Hippolytus in 235 AD. In Ames, Iowa, I was buried alive like the martyr Hendrik Pruijt in 1574 AD. In Burlington, Vermont, I raced past lines of knife-wielding young people as if I were the martyrs Saturninus, Secundulus, and Satur in 304 AD. And with each new deat
h, what brought me back quickest was the need to find a radio and monitor the journey of “The Ballad of Old Mr. Finch” up the charts: Number eighty-two, Number fifty-five, Number twenty-four. Bunny’s song, just like Zebulon X himself, kept on ramblin’ on.

  I hoped that game-show guest host John Glenn was watching—Spin the Wheel of Misfortune had become a full-time gig. Over the next year I fashioned my own Dark Ages inside the Age of Aquarius, a one-man Roman Inquisition with myself playing every juicy role, from heretic victim to grand inquisitor, testifier, jailer, torturer, and executioner. By the time Scheinberg convinced me to join a White House picket line, I was certain that I would one day attain the martyr milestone of the Huguenots, slaughtered by the thousands in 1572 by Roman Catholics, until Parisian gutters gurgled red with French Calvinist blood. These lurid details fired my imagination better than any of Scheinberg’s politicking.

  The scene in Washington astounded me. I could no longer regard NSTF’s marching as trumped-up bellyaching; it had evolved into the type of movement not seen in America since we’d broken with the Brits. Twenty thousand demonstrators mobbed Pennsylvania Avenue, including sitting politicians and yodeling singer-songwriters like Judy Collins and Phil Ochs, who incited their fans to climb atop cop cars, link arms, and sing right through the thrown eggs and coffee that soon made their T-shirt slogans unreadable.

  It was a circus complete with mimes, jugglers, stilt-walkers, face-painters, and, around two in the afternoon, a fun-for-the-whole-family martyrdom. I was introduced as usual with a short speech, often from Scheinberg himself, who would extrapolate upon some morsel of martyr esoterica I’d mentioned in passing, ad libbing the whole thing, powered by an engine that burned rage like oil. Scheinberg was no velvet-throated Barker; the amps sizzled and smoked at his spitting sibilance and distorted decibels.

  “Back before this war, before the last war, before the war before that, back in ye olde 1508, there was a Mr. Whittenham, who they called a ‘chancellor,’ and I don’t have to explain to you cats what that means! It means he was one of the pigs! And he had in his pig hooves a woman who wouldn’t vomit back the hateful bile he poured down her throat, who stood up for justice and freedom of thought, and this Whittenham, this Piggenham, he burned this woman at the stake. But what our own martyr, Zebulon X, taught me is that all pigs get butchered in the end, you dig? While this good woman was burning, see, a bull broke loose and horned Mr. Piggenham right in the gut and ran around with his intestines until his vile, stinking, fascist shit was all over the goddamn courtyard! What does that mean for us? Well, let’s work it out, man! We’re the bull, our protest is our horns, and Piggenham is warmongering America, and it’s their guts we’re going to drag around the whole country until people smell the shit and start paying attention!”