Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

  Eventually, however, both the marriage—Ziller's second—and the business venture—his first—did, in a curious way, succeed. Even before the Corpse arrived, he had in wife and zoo a very definite roadside attraction.

  As the reader must have guessed, the “gypsy” whom Mr. Ziller took to wife was Amanda, then twenty years of age and swelling with her second indiscretion. For those who savor the usually suspect “facts” of romantic love, an attempt will be made to render the details of the meeting, the courtship and the wedding. But first, in the interest of exposition—

  A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

  John Paul Ziller was born in the Congo. That was all. Born there. When he was one year old, his missionary parents returned to America and John Paul spent the rest of his childhood in a Lutheran parsonage in Olympia, Washington. But he was born in Africa. That made a difference.

  When a Tarzan film would come to Olympia, John Paul would be at every screening—in the front row with his little friends, telling them loudly, “I was born in that jungle there. I used to swing on them vines.” No kid in his neighborhood could play Jungle Jim or Tim Tyler without hiring (for gum balls) John Paul as technical adviser. He could describe the poisons with which certain pygmies smeared their arrows, he knew that simba was the Swahili word for lion. The fact that he gathered that information from the library books which he devoured like cookies was of no consequence. He had been born in the jungle, he really had.

  By high school, most of the children of Olympia had outgrown games of Tarzan. Ostensibly, John Paul had, too. Maybe he was not quite like the others, but he was no freak. He was the best drummer the school dance band had ever had, and he made good grades, especially in art (those masks he carved were terrific). Although he was well over six feet tall, he did not play basketball, and sometimes his obvious disdain for competitive sports elicited physical attacks from some jock who doubted John Paul's “patriotism.” His virility, however, was never questioned. After all, he had been the first male in his set to have the courage to visit Big Ruth's in Aberdeen (where he was said to have gotten all to which his five dollars entitled him) and he was the first boy to “go the limit” with Elizabeth Lee Franklin, thereby launching her long and dedicated career. Such feats insured his popularity with the boys, and with the girls? well, John Paul was lean and mysterious and sophisticated and “Golly, mom, he's better than any drummer I ever heard on the radio or anywhere.”

  If one accepted his devotion to music and sculpture as normal, then John Paul's only peculiarity seemed to be a kind of exaggerated romanticism in which he sat as a deity in an aura. He was a dreamer who entertained exotic visions of himself, visions related to what he obviously regarded as his ties to another zone, perhaps to another time. When a chaperon caught him drinking beer at the junior prom, he asked, “John Paul, what makes you so darn wild? Is it because your dad's a preacher?” And John Paul got that funny smug look in his eyes and said, “It's in my blood, Mr. Yarber. When I was born, the drums of Kivu beat all night long, the hyenas ate my afterbirth.”

  Soon after graduation, John Paul took his late father's insurance money (fortunately, the old parson had not taken his “God will provide” sermons so literally as to ignore the man from Fidelity Life) and was off to Paris “to study art.” The next that Olympia saw of him was three years later when he showed up with a fantastic mustache and a young baboon on a leash.

  The Indo-Tibetan Circus & Giant Panda Gypsy Blues Band, being a somewhat unorthodox troupe, often aroused the ire of policemen, pastors and pursed-lipped ladies: those vigilant citizens who saw in the exotic trappings of traveling show folk a manifestation of some unnamed conspiracy to subvert their politico-moral prerogatives. Generally, however, as a result of the manager's buttery tongue, rustic diplomacy and thoughtful monetary “donations,” the show was allowed to go on (as they say), and by and large those community elders who reviewed the performance would agree that while some of it was weirdly incomprehensible, it had entertaining and even educational features and was unlikely to turn their children into Communists, desperadoes or fiends.

  So, while the troupe frequently was sideswiped by the machinery of law and righteousness it deftly avoided a head-on collision—until one mid-August dawn in Sacramento. Some say the orders came from California's glamorous governor himself, although there was scant proof to genuinely involve the guv. No matter. The raid, at whoever's instigation, did occur. And after each member of the circus had been harassed, intimidated and thoroughly searched (the girls' vaginas were explored for hidden vials), eight of the troupers were hauled into jail on charges of possession of narcotics—although the substance found by police was not a narcotic but merely the mild euphoric marijuana, the law being somewhat remiss in making the proper pharmacological distinctions.

  Those forty or so troupers not arrested—this group included Amanda and her baby son—moved to an isolated spot on the Sacramento River some miles out of town. There, they arranged their silver milk wagons, star-spangled VW microbuses, motorcycles and mystery-emblemmed '50 Dodge panel trucks in a circle, camping inside its circumference in the manner of early American pioneers. For two weeks, they feasted, danced, swam, fished, read, rested, practiced their acts and awaited the trial of their companions. When Justice came, she was not quite as predatory as some had feared. Two troupers had their cases dismissed for lack of evidence, four were released with fines and suspended sentences. The remaining two, however, were second offenders and they received prison terms of five years each. One of these had been a roustabout and the circus manager replaced him easily with one of the young unemployed cowboys who had taken to hanging around the Sacramento River campsite. For the other, unfortunately, a substitute could not so quickly be found. He was Palumbo the drummer (whose prior conviction had been for smuggling butterfly eggs in the hollow of his bass), and in order to drum with the Giant Panda one had not only to be versed in the blue-rock tradition but had to have musicological knowledge and polyrhythmic aptitudes so as to help weave those esoteric and eclectic textures in which the Giant Panda specialized.

  Since there were several weeks of good bookings awaiting the circus in Oregon and Washington—dates that must be kept if the show was to finish the season in the black—the manager and the bandleader pulled the most roadworthy vehicle out of the encampment and sped down to San Francisco in search of a suitable drummer. Days passed. An occasional northbound traveler would stop by the encampment to deliver the message, “No chops yet.” On the tenth day, in the midst of a late communal breakfast of toasted puffball mushrooms (Lycoperdon gemmatum, Madame Lincoln Rose Goody would have called them), yogurt and fresh pine needle tea, the missing van squealed into camp, smiles hanging out of both windows.

  “We got us a drummer.”

  “God almighty yes, we do have us a drummer.”

  “And do you know what drummer we got?”

  “Ringo Starr?” asked a mouth full of puffball.

  “We got John Paul Ziller,” the manager cheered. “He's gonna join us here in two or three days.”

  Around the breakfast fire there rose a loud buzzing. Many troupers were excited, others clearly puzzled. Amanda, for example, was certain she'd heard of the new drummer but she could not readily identify him.

  Well, by this time next week every man, woman and child in the civilized world may know the name Ziller and for whom it stands. But for the present it must be assumed Ziller is, to the general public, a nonentity. Therefore, the writer calls for additional.

  BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES I

  Occupation __________. On the billions of varied (yet somehow identical) forms in whose linear receptacles (__________) Western man deposits the salient data of his being, upon whose tiny empty lots (__________) he erects the established facts of his identity; on those forms—tax statements, credit applications, mortgage papers, divorce papers, Social Security forms, insurance policies, Selective Service examinations, job applications, census surveys, police blotters, rental leases, passports,
medical records, ad infinitum, near the tops of those forms not far from the open spaces provided for such cardinal intelligence as Name __________, Address __________, Sex __________ and Marital Status __________, there is an area of perhaps an inch in length and one-eighth of an inch in height for the confession of one's Occupation __________. Even John Paul Ziller, although more loosely rooted in the hardpan of traditional behavior than most men, was forced from time to time to fill in forms. And when Ziller would come to Occupation__________, he always wrote “magician.”

  Now as the reader shall soon learn, whatever compensation Ziller earned (prior to the opening of the roadside zoo) came from his artistic endeavors: visual and/or musical. And while there is no little magic in the arts, particularly the way that Ziller practiced them, it must be assumed that in calling himself a magician John Paul was speaking figuratively and, face it, pretentiously. Yet, in reviewing Ziller's life—as some have been wont to do these past few days—one concludes that “magician” probably covers his activities as well as any other occupational description. After all, it is indicative of some kind of appropriateness when a CIA agent says of a fugitive as one said yesterday of Ziller, “We'll tear this country apart if necessary to get our hands on that fucking magician.”

  II

  Never prolific as a sculptor, it has been several years now since Ziller has exhibited at all. Yet few articles on avant-garde art are published that do not refer to his contribution. That the authors seldom are in agreement as to the nature of his contribution only supports the general notion of its significance.

  The Non-vibrating Astrological Dodo Dome Spectacular was his masterpiece, about that there is no quarrel. When it was unveiled at the Whitney Museum of American Art it brought to its obscure young creator the art-world equivalent of the kind of instant notoriety a starlet achieves when she successfully pulls a film out from under the weight of a veteran and venerated actress. It was saluted as a tour de force and cursed as a scandal. Some critics were afraid to acknowledge it, others afraid not to. When a representative of the New York Times called at Ziller's studio for an interview, she was received by a near-naked, savage-looking man who stopped playing his clay flute only long enough to insist that the complex electrochemical sculpture in question actually had been executed by his pet baboon.

  III

  The prominent Janstelli Gallery presented Ziller's first one-man show of Cosmos Mystique Apparati. These were fiber glass pyramids and cones (volcano-like) about five feet tall. Some were covered with the skins of poisonous reptiles, others with the feathers of small gray birds. Others were painted in translucent whites and pinks, often with a bulb of weak light bulging in the bowels of the fiber glass like some frosty hemorrhoid or mathematical pun. Near the base of each piece was riveted a small brass plate which read: “Upon proper viewing, the external surface heat of this apparatus may reach 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, Old Master techniques are known to fail.”

  IV

  “The Janstelli Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of Ready Made Fossils, created by John Paul Ziller who has recently returned from travels in Africa (or was it India?).”

  The artist had carved from ivory, alabaster and onyx replicas of important archaeological tidbits: the jawbone of Java man, skull fragments of Marmes man, telltale arm sockets from Tanganyika. Ziller chose to display these half concealed in mounds of sand or mud which he had dumped on the gallery floor. Upon two of the more striking pieces (embossed with gold), vats of fresh garbage had been poured. And the largest piece was buried beneath a pile of offal Ziller had gathered along the bridle paths of Central Park. Naturally, as the days wore on, the exhibition began to engage senses other than sight and touch, offering somewhat of a challenge to olfactory aesthetics.

  V

  At the same time that Ziller was itching the visual art world with his fossils, apparati, post-lunar illuminated Buddha turds and magnetic jade divining rods (helpful in locating the lost city of Mu), his reputation as a drummer was running like a vine along the invisible walls of the musical underground.

  In those days he blew jazz, chiefly of the Afro-Cuban variety. Such was his ability that he was welcomed at jam sessions of the top jazzmen in New York, and on occasion he sat in during gigs at famous clubs such as the Half Note, the Five Spot and the Village Gate, drumming in the bata fashion while using an African thumb harp for orchestral effect. Since it was rumored that he had turned down chairs in some very fine combos, there was an eddy of interest in the musical undercurrent when word flashed around that Ziller was about to organize his own band. Zollie Abraham, who both promoted jazz and wrote books about it, visited Ziller with a twofold plan: (1) he would contract Ziller's group for a New England campus tour and (2) he would write an article on the aims of the new band for Downbeat magazine. It was a warm autumn day and Ziller and his baboon were seated on a Nigerian cotton cushion in front of an open window, eating plums and listening to the sounds that bounced in off the streets. There was a smell of carbon in the air. Upon hearing Abraham's proposal, Ziller, yellow berries of plum juice hanging from the hairs of his mustache, replied, “The jazz was the very same shape as the keyhole so that went through, the blues was lean and conditioned to suffering so it snugged through, but the rock was big like a sausage and got stuck in the middle ear to the ground.”

  Pretty pissed, Abraham went away and informed all the jazzheads that Ziller was insane and an opportunist to boot. He had sold out to rock-and-roll.

  In the mashed banana sunlight of Labor Day morning, Amanda basked on a log in the Sacramento River, talking to her two closest friends in the Indo-Tibetan Circus: Nearly Normal Jimmy and Smokestack Lightning. A burly redhead whose walrus nose and oxblood mustache both drooped wearily as if overpowered by the weight of his ice-cube-thick spectacles, Nearly Normal Jimmy was manager and ringmaster of the circus. An administrative genius, Nearly Normal had been a childhood playmate of Amanda's and had befriended her again after he dropped out of the University of Arizona Business School to manage and produce the Capitalist Pig. It had been this myopic red pug who introduced Amanda to Stanislaw. And it was the same Nearly Normal who recruited her for the circus. It was he, too, who found a job for Palumbo, the ill-fated drummer, after Stanislaw had been deported and the Capitalist Pig disbanded.

  At seventy-three, Smokestack Lightning could still do a dance that lowered the blood temperature of the most urbane and confident white American. In the circus arena, lit only by a dry twig fire, the old Apache would don his Ghost shirt, its blue-dyed buckskin adorned with thunderbirds and fat white stars (a design that had been revealed to the shirt's original owner in a vision). Then he would commence a performance of calculated frenzy, identifying his bodily rhythms with the historical migrations of his people, recalling both their triumphs and their tribulations, insinuating their glories and humiliations, howling myths in the shadows like a coyote, clacking his peyote-stained teeth like a beaver, arching his back like a mesa, planting his toes like a dawn of agriculture, weeping like a long winter, laughing like the mouth of a river, stalking with his arrowed eyes some unlicensed prey in the faces of the audience. And the audience would sit chilled, bound to the stake of congenital guilt, its thoughts paddling along some quiet piney lake or spurring a pony around the bend of a canyon, all trails however clean and simple leading to the scene of slaughter; the woodsmoke ribboning from the dancer's tiny fire filtered through Cinemascope and dime novels and TV tubes and Jungian memory to sting spectators' eyes with metaphors of barbaric lust, as if it were the gunsmoke and torchsmoke still lingering from some old wounded knee meadow of battle, cooking their hearts over the embers of once-bright genocide. And when the drums suddenly froze and the hard mahogany Indian stilled his dance at the summit of its demonic power to shriek in perfect magpie Trickster, to scream in flawless American, "Hi'niswa'-vita' ki'-ni"—"We shall live again!"—the stoutest of mechanics coughed nervously and children and women were known to pee in their pants.
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br />   Smokestack Lightning also executed an expurgated version of the Hopi rain dance, using live rattlesnakes when he could get away with it: the deputy sheriffs in some towns forced him to substitute nonpoisonous serpents in the interest of public safety. Incidentally, it was a couple of those garter-snake substitutes that the newlywed Zillers purchased to stock their roadside zoo, although the reader doesn't have to be burdened with all these details, now does he?

  Amanda plopped her feet in the cool water. “What truly mystifies me,” she confided to her friends, “is the way things are always happening to me during thunderstorms. My oddest experiences, the ones that are most occult or that seem to seep out of the deepest cracks in my psyche, invariably happen just before or in the middle of some storm. I mean it's spooky. As if there's some connection between my innermost karmic structure and violent electrical disturbances. Why do you suppose that is?”

  All squinty-eyed, Nearly Normal Jimmy was wiping river spray from his glasses with a brakeman's bandanna. “People's heads are always affected by thunderstorms,” he allowed. “It's the negative particles released in the atmosphere. Ozone gas is released, too. It activates the mind. Makes you feel kinda high, haven't you ever noticed feeling kinda high just before a storm? People dream more, dream more vividly when there's a heavy concentration of ozone in the air. They've proved this in scientific experiments. Did you know that if you take an IQ test during a thunderstorm, or just before one hits, you'll make a higher score than you normally would? That's a fact. Activates the brain. Shit, baby, you're like everybody else, just more sensitive, that's all.”

  “Thunder is sky power,” said Smokestack Lightning. “Very different from powers of earth or underearth. Much war come between power above and power below. Maybe war between head of Amanda and body of Amanda? No, maybe not so. Thunder is season power. Always come before spring season. Make corn grow, make trees catch flower. Thunder friendly spirit but big, clumsy, sometimes break things. Maybe Amanda have big spirit in her. Big power. Sky power. But she cannot understand. Because she woman. Also have earth power. Earth is woman. Woman is earth. What so big sky power doing in woman . . . ?” The Indian's voice faded. It was nearly noon. The day had an edge of real heat now. Amanda was wearing a little shift of off-white organdy which she had picked up at the Sears store in San Luis Obispo and to the neckline of which she had sewn peacock feathers and beads of black glass. It was a thin textile and she wore no bra. The sun warmed her chest like a VapoRub. Very relaxed, she had mulled over her companions' explanations of the thunderstorm syndrome for just a minute or two when she became aware of a fourth person, a stranger, in their midst.