Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

  “Dear Marx Marvelous,” said Amanda. “Champion of resistance. Have you forgotten so quickly then how you learned to stop flinching and accept the rain? Oh well. You still haven't revealed why you chose to come here. Of course, you needn't tell if you don't want to.”

  “I'll tell you straight away. I didn't want to wander around from scene to scene, always arriving at the tail end of things. I didn't have time for fads, cults or false prophets. Frankly, the activities which usually characterize a period of religious transition are quite unappealing to me. No, I decided that since the first substantial, recognizable evidence of the next religion would undoubtedly appear out on the limits of the psychic frontier, my best plan would be to find some compatible person or persons who reside on the psychic frontier and to cast my lot with them and work from there. After hearing about the Zillers from Nearly Normal Jimmy and others—your husband is something of a legend in New York—I decided that you were ideal. A photograph of you, Amanda, shown to me by Jimmy unquestionably influenced my decision. One can't be totally devoted to science, you know.”

  “Marx Marvelous, you're as nutty as a Mars bar. This is a little roadside attraction sitting out in the rains of isolated Northwest America, enticing passing motorists with a sausage smile. We have sunshine juices for mildewed tummies and exotic exhibitions for jaded eyes. But we do not concern ourselves with religions or sciences. We are ignorant of your psychic frontier. Are you positive you are in the right place? What was it Jimmy said to lead you to assume that we hold the key to some . . . some evolutionary religious awakening?”

  “I don't know that I can tell you explicitly. As much as anything else, I had a feeling about this place.”

  “A feeling?” Amanda clapped her hands and squealed. “A hunch! You mean you had a hunch. See what I told you. You confessed at playing at chance earlier than I thought you would. You came here on a kind of hunch and you admit it, don't you?”

  “Partially.” Marvelous was blushing. “Only partially. You people may be going through the motions of operating a roadside zoo, but I know there are other levels of activity here. I have every reason to suspect that your crazy hot dog stand is a front for doings of a more valuable elevation.”

  “All right,” said Amanda. “We can't fool you. You are too shrewd for us. It's only a matter of time before you expose us so I might as well confess to everything. My husband and I are agents of the great Icelandic conspiracy.”

  “Joke if you must,” said Marvelous. “But I know you are up to something extraordinary here. I know it even if you don't.”

  Amanda giggled and stood up, her skirt settling like nightfall over the maverick cunt-hair that for a golden moment had flown from the staff of champions. “You really are silly,” she said. “Luckily for you, I am found of silliness. What's more, you're cute.” She dragged her silvered nails along the seam of his trousers.

  Marx had grown rather pale and now he slumped even more awkwardly against the totem pole.

  “What's wrong?” asked Amanda.

  “I guess I just got too worked up. It's another of my shortcomings as a scientist; I get carried away. Damn it all. I hadn't planned to tell you so much. I had intended to live here as somewhat of a spy. Confessions must be hard on me. Anyway, I feel a bit faint.” He was gasping.

  Amanda withdrew from her bosom a black silk handkerchief bordered with gold braid. Passing it to Marvelous, she said, “Hold this to your nose.”

  Marx hadn't expected a girl as healthy as Amanda to carry smelling salts, but he followed her instructions. From the handkerchief there came a subtle waft, an effluvium of sweetness. Even while he sniffed it, however, its perfume became gradually stronger, then musky, then barbarically acrid. He was about to yank the fabric away from his nostrils when yet another odor emerged, this one spicy and primordial. In turn, that fragrance also passed and in its place oozed an aroma of lanolin and leather, a rich animal funk flanked by a mineral smell as dry as ash.

  Smiling at Marx's befuddlement, Amanda said, “That handkerchief has been dipped in a jar containing the accumulated odors of twelve years in Tibet. I had planned to send it to Nearly Normal Jimmy, but perhaps he won't be needing it.”

  Dumfounded, Marvelous said nothing and continued to sniff. He smelled malty vapors and fatty ones, thin olfactory outlines of the mountains and windy whiffs of the snows. Meanwhile, as if fulfilling Amanda's prophecy, several cars had parked out front and their occupants were filing expectantly into the roadhouse. “Enough now,” said Amanda, reaching for the square of silk. “The zoo has customers and you have a lot to learn. You'd better follow me about and watch me carefully. Tomorrow we're going to be closed all day for a morel hunt, but on Friday you may have to run the place alone.”

  Blinking, Marx Marvelous returned the handkerchief, but throughout the day as he helped Amanda wipe tables and counters, as he poured juice, memorized a short lecture on San Francisco garter snakes and learned how to direct fleas in chariot races and ballets, there lingered in his nasal passages certain odors of lotus blossom, yak butter, prayer wheels—and one exceedingly stimulating fragrance which Amanda would identify only as Mom's Tibetan peach pie.

  "There are three mental states that interest me,” said Amanda, turning the lizard doorknob. “These are : one, amnesia; two, euphoria; three, ecstasy."

  She reached into the cabinet and removed a small green bottle of water-lily pollen. “Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is—and still not caring.”

  Some readers were probably surprised to learn that Amanda spoke with a lisp. The author would be pleased to describe her lisp for you, although it will not be easy. Marx Marvelous observed that it was a Gene Tierney lisp, but he was wrong. It was slighter than that. Slighter, warmer, pinker, more vulnerable. It was more of a Gloria Grahame lisp. Remember Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat? Her gangster boy friend threw a pot of scalding coffee in her face. A noisy episode. Gloria Grahame didn't lisp when she screamed.

  If you don't remember Gloria Grahame (or even if you do), maybe you have heard of the Great Blondino. He was the Mozart of the tightrope, the Great Blondino. A child prodigy, Blondino was already a virtuoso of high-rope acrobatics at six. As an adult, he won fame for his repeated crossings of Niagara Falls. In the 1860's he walked a rope over Niagara once on stilts, once with both feet in a sack. He hoped over with a man on his back while fireworks popped in the air about him. Once, he sat down on the rope, hundreds of feet above the roaring cataracts, and cooked and ate an omelet. Throughout his career of perilous performances, he never had a close call or sustained an injury. While walking a safe city sidewalk during a stay in Sydney, Australia, however, Blondino slipped on a banana peel and broke his neck. Picture Amanda's lisp as that banana peel.

  Or, let us look at it another way. A Chinese philosopher once taught his pupils the meaning of agression by having them wad up spring blossoms and throw them against a wall. To arrive at an understanding of Amanda's lisp, simply reverse the process.

  Among the Haida Indians of the Pacific Northwest, the verb for “making poetry” is the same as the verb “to breathe."

  Such tidbits of ethnic lore delighted Amanda, and she vowed that from that time onward she would try to regulate each breath as if she were composing a poem. She was as good as her word, and her new style of breathing added to her warehouse of personal charm.

  Once, while breathing an especially strenuous stanza, she sucked in a stinkbug that had been bumbling by. “What a rotten rhyme,” she gagged. “I think I'll go back to prose.”

  Amanda took Marx Marvelous on a tour of the grove out back. There was moss in the grove and fir needles and ferns. There was mud and grass and weeds, but no rocks. There was a tipi, and a wooden table carved to resemble a mushroom. On those rare days when it was not raining, the grove was the Zillers' living room, nursery and dining area. It was here, protected and private, that th
ey entertained their few (and mostly uninvited) guests.

  In his checkered suit, now rather soiled, Marvelous strutted about the grove, jaws flapping. “Yes, there is an air of asylum out here,” he flapped. “This grove does for my insecurities what Preparation H does for my hemorrhoids: shrinks them without surgery. Brings to mind the grove in ancient Italy where Romulus, shunned by his neighbors after he had slain his brother, established a sanctuary for fugitives, rebels, and aliens—the future citizens of Rome. In honor of the god Consus, kidnaped virgins were borne to the grove to participate in bacchanalian festivals and to observe secret feasts and games. A good time was had by all.

  “Of course,” he flapped on, skewering Amanda with that blue-eyed barbed-wire glare that he reserved for persons whom he suspected of mystical inclinations, “you would prefer to compare it to Jetavana, the grove at Savatthi where the Illustrious Buddha dwelt. No kidnaped virgins for old Buddha, huh? Just mangoes and figs. You are what you eat.”

  Before Amanda could respond, Marvelous came upon a small chicken pen at the outer edge of the grove. There was in the pen a pavilion under whose roof a solitary rooster stood. “My God,” exclaimed Marvelous. “That's the most bowlegged chicken I've ever seen. It's outrageous. Why don't you put it on display in the zoo?”

  Amanda shook her head. “No,” she said. “He's done a lot of walking. He deserves a rest.”

  "Why has Mr. Marvelous chosen to join us here at our zoo?” asked John Paul Ziller. The hour was midnight. He closed the book with the savage cover (the journal?) and lay down beside his naked wife.

  “Mr. Marvelous has misplaced something and wants to make sure that we have not found it,” Amanda answered. As was her nightly custom in cool climates, she was massaging her lower body with Mother Blacksnake's Sunrise Oil. Her tattoos glistened like a new model of the universe.

  “I trust that it was nothing important,” muttered John Paul.

  “Were it important, he would not have lost it,” Amanda said.

  Hello, reader. May the author once again intrude upon whatever mood his narrative might have established long enough to report on current events? This is the fifth day that Amanda, Baby Thor and your correspondent have been officially held prisoner. We were surrounded for a day or two prior to that, but it was not until John Paul and Plucky fled five days ago that those of us who remained at the zoo were bluntly notified of our quarantine.

  Due to the liberation early this morning of the garter snakes—after warming them into a state of hyperactivity with a heating pad we shooed them one by one out the back door past the dozing guards—the agents are unusually hostile. Their pornographic taunting of Amanda has become increasingly sadistic, and the writer has been assured that only a (temporary?) restraining order from a higher echelon is preventing him from being mauled.

  Apparently, however, their orders bid them maintain a reasonable distance, for not since the devastating search of four days ago has an agent set foot upstairs. Thus, unless they spot us at a window, or we venture down to the kitchen for food, we are spared their harassment, although their menacing vectors seem at times to penetrate our walls.

  Taking his cue from Amanda, who, in between trances, has spent the day teaching Baby Thor the songs of gypsies and Indians, the author has tried to proceed with his writing, aloof from the threatening forces that encircle him. He has done rather well, too. His Remington has been yapping since breakfast and he has grown to appreciate the beauty of its bark. Just one more day! At the rate he is working that is all it will take to finish this. One more good day like this one. Will they grant it?

  The reader may be perplexed to discover that this document is fairly near completion while there yet remains so much to learn. Please do not despair. All pertinent data concerning the Corpse will be imparted ere the author brings his account to term—providing, as he has said, that the authorities grant him one more day at the typewriter minus unpleasant interruption. To those readers who may be also annoyed because this report is somewhat remiss in linear progression and does not scurry at a snappy pace from secondary climax to secondary climax to major climax as is customary in our best books, the writer is less apologetic. He is dealing with real events, which do not always unfold as neatly as even our more objective periodicals would have us believe, and he feels no obligation to entertain you with cheap literary tricks.

  For those of you who may have come to these pages in the course of a scholastic assignment and are impatient for information to relay to your professor (who, unless he is a total dolt, has it simmering in his brainpan already), the author suggests that you turn immediately to the end of the book and roust out those facts which seem necessary to your cause. Of course, should you do so, you will grow up half-educated and will likely suffer spiritual and sexual deprivations. But it is your decision.

  As we drive up the river road, there are sixty thousand trees which I see but do not touch. Like me, Amanda is confined in the speeding Jeep, but she touches every tree.

  Entry—May 10

  Notebook of M. Marvelous

  “The morel is a very wary little mushroom,” explained Amanda. “It hides under fallen leaves as if it were willfully avoiding the hunter's pluck. Like many of nature's noblest creatures it is a fugitive kind.”

  The Jeep, piloted by John Paul, was speeding up the river road. Amanda had executed rough sketches of the morel. She was showing them to Marx Marvelous.

  “As you can see, the cap of the morel is shaped rather like a thimble. A withered thimble. It is pitted, carved with irregular indentations; honeycombed, as it were. The color of the cap ranges from tan to creamy brown to a dishwater gray—colors that echo equally the decaying leaves underfoot and the sodden skies above. The stem is ivory-white, long and hollow. Frequently, you will come upon stems alone and you may wonder where the caps have gone. To the deer, that's where. Morel caps are the deer's spring tonic. They spurn the stems and leave them standing. We are not as particular as the deer.”

  A short distance from the roadside zoo, they had wheeled east-northeastward off the Freeway and motored for a ways through fields and pastures of stinging green. Past Burlington, trees grew more plentiful and there were bright green bogs in which the skunk cabbage looked like exploding canaries or lemons that had been hammered into sheaves. After leaving the town of Sedro-Woolley (site of Northern State Hospital for the Insane), they began to climb, climbing as if the concentrated pressure of those locked-up crazies was propelling them to loftier altitudes. Higher, higher.

  The river was an oxide green and buzzing with silvery silt. If there were fish in it they were well concealed, but occasional steelhead fishermen stood in their flat-bottomed boats, silhouetted in the Skagit mist like mackinawed wraiths. Landward, alders, vine maple and cottonwood thronged down the hillsides to the edge of the road. Where these budding deciduous treelings were mixed with larger, older conifers, there Amanda would point and say, “In April, morels lurked in those groves by the hundreds. The weather is too warm for them now. If we hope to catch morels today, we must go to higher elevations. Even there we won't find many. If we apply ourselves we should get enough for one fine dinner, but this is definitely the last morel hunt of the season.”

  Marx Marvelous looked over the sketches. He read the morel's botanical name (courtesy of Madame Lincoln Rose Goody): Morchella esculenta. He re-examined the drawings. Something dark and ill-defined rustled its arms (or wings or tail) in the hollow behind his heart. He was unconvinced that he wished to dine on these demonic fruits. Morel season could have ended sooner for all he cared. “How can we be sure we aren't picking toadstools?” he asked.

  “Specialization is such general tyranny,” thought Amanda. “Was it when man initiated the division of labor that he lost contact with the complete reality and began to fragment and go numb? Here we have a scientist, a man who has sacrificed this lifetime to the study of the Earth and its workings, and he does not know that 'toadstool' is just another name for mushroom, edible or to
xic. How puny his particular knowledge. Still, I suppose it is necessary. Isn't it?” She thought these thoughts to herself as in her mind's eye she ran naked through the woods, hugging trees.

  To Marvelous, she said: “If it is poison you are worried about, you had better stay away from supermarket foods with their preservatives and pesticides.”

  “Oh, I feel totally at ease in supermarkets,” said Marvelous lightly.

  You would, thought Amanda. Canned peas are not a very potent image. A package of frozen french fries lacks roots that reach into the deep chambers of human consciousness. Ah, but mushrooms! They are standard equipment for sorcerers and poisoners, eh, Marx? Associated in art, literature and folklore with the wicked and exotic, the mushroom has been used since primitive times to represent death—and death's fair sister, sex. Mushrooms have been called “devil's fruit” and “satan's bread.” They do not take to domestication. They lurk in the forest, as-sume skeleton hues and smell of rot and Pan. Our dear scientist obviously is uncomfortable dabbling in the black arts of yore. She thought these thoughts to herself as in her mind's eye she hugged each further tree trunk, bark and lichen flaking off in green-red scrumbles against her breasts.

  To Marx Marvelous she said: “Frankly, there is a poisonous species which is sometimes confused with the morel. It is commonly called the brain mushroom (how Madame Goody refers to it I do not know) and its cap is convoluted like the lobes of the organ for which it is named. That is how one distinguishes it from the morel, in fact. It is folded into many convolutions, rather than depressed as is the morel. If you examine your quarry with this distinction in mind, you cannot possibly make an unpleasant mistake.”