Another Roadside Attraction

by Tom Robbins

  The clock struck (if you could call it that) 6:50. We had been cooped up in the pantry for ten hours. Baby Thor was fretting for attention. Mon Cul was complaining about the length of his shift (in the wilds a baboon sentry is relieved after five hours). I was hungry, tired and damn near suffocated by cigar smoke. Purcell and I had at last reached an area of relative agreement. It seemed the appropriate moment to adjourn the meeting, and I was about to do so when Amanda motioned that she wished to speak. “By all means,” I said, for she had said little that day and I was anxious for her opinions.

  “I was on a butterfly hike through Mexico,” began Amanda, “when I was offered a ride by a young American and his elderly grandmother. The young man taught school in Ohio. He lived with his grandmother who was over eighty. He wanted to travel in Mexico during summer vacation, but there was no one to look after Granny. Besides, the school-teacher earned a small salary. The grandmother had all the money. So he took her along.

  “For several days I rode with them. It was extremely hot. One day about noon, the grandmother had a stroke and died. We were in the desert, miles from any settlement. What to do? Well, we put the grandmother in my sleeping bag and zipped it up all around. Then we tied her to the top of the car. On we drove. Followed by vultures.

  “Toward dusk we came to a fair-sized town. Our throats were parched, so we stopped at a cantina for cold beer. When we came outside, we found that the car had been stolen. Sleeping bag, grandmother and all.

  “The schoolteacher and I stayed in the town for a week. We bribed the police daily. But our possessions were never recovered. Even today, there is a missing Ohio schoolteacher's car somewhere in Mexico. A missing sleeping bag. A missing grandmother. Perhaps she is still tied on the top of the car.”

  “That's an interesting story,” I admitted, “but I fail to see how it relates to—”

  “I haven't finished. The schoolteacher and I became lovers. We rented an adobe house with the grandmother's money and lived like Mexicans. Every morning I got up and made tortillas. While I worked, the schoolteacher sat in the shade in his undershorts and read aloud to me from books. I did not care for his taste in literature, which ran toward the classical and the morbid, but it made him happy to read to me so I did not object.

  “One morning he read me a story by a pessimistic Russian. It was about a man who wished to test the intelligence of religious believers, so he began to practice asceticism and to utter ersatz profundities. He quickly attracted thousands of disciples to whom he preached his made-up doctrines. They proclaimed him a saint. Then one day, to show his followers how easily they'd been duped, he announced that all he had taught them was nonsense. Unable to live without their belief, they stoned him to death and went right on believing.”

  Amanda got up to leave.

  “I get the point,” I said.

  “I get it, too,” said Plucky Purcell.

  Had our negotiations been in vain?

  Would society regard the Corpse as a hoax?

  Would Jesus fail to save mankind in death as he had in life?

  Would we get our butts shot off?

  Where could we go from here?

  Darkness had fallen. The duck hunters had long since left the waterways. Green-scented clouds obscured the moon.

  I followed Amanda upstairs to watch her give Thor his bath. It excited me when she scrubbed his private parts.

  Despite Amanda's intimation that our hopes for the Corpse were futile and our fears for it without foundation, I believed that the first pantry session had been beneficial. It had put the situation into frontal perspective, had established guidelines for further discussion and had disentangled some of the strands. That Plucky and I had done 99 per cent of the talking caused me neither surprise nor dismay. The Zillers had been engaged on their own levels of selfhood, levels perhaps more absolute than ours. In time, they would speak. Or act. I remained convinced of their special wisdom, and I was confident that they would make a substantial contribution to whatever solution was reached concerning the mummy. Deadline was still two days away. I was prepared to wait.

  Baby Thor giggled when Amanda soaped his balls. His tiny penis grew erect in her slippery hands. “Jesus was nailed to the cross,” said Amanda. She said it matter-of-factly.

  “That's how the story goes,” I said. “So what?”

  “The cross is a tree, and the tree is a phallus. There's something in that, Marx.” She examined Thor's member as if it were a crucifix. I imagined it on a chain about her neck. (Don't flinch, Thor, I was only kidding.)

  “If there's something in it, it's too obscure for me. Can you explain?”

  “Jesus was a Jew. Judaism was a father religion. Christianity also grew into a father religion. But the old religion was a mother religion. We've had two thousand years of penis power.”

  “Is that bad?”

  “It isn't a question of bad or good. It never is. But when the phallus is separated from the womb, when the father is separated from the mother, when culture is separated from nature, when the spirit is separated from the flesh . . . then life is out of balance and the people become frustrated and violent.”

  “Well, the past two thousand years have been frustrated and violent, all right. What you're saying is that Jesus came into a naturally balanced world and threw it out of line.”

  “All I'm saying is, tomorrow when you are alone thinking about Jesus, open your window. Don't sit there in your stuffy room, all full of books and no air. Open your windows to the fir needles and the ducks and the fields and the river. That way your approach will be more unified and your conclusions more exact.”

  Her remarks sounded, on the surface of them, straight-forward enough, yet there was something elusive about them, a meaning or pretended meaning which my mind's fist could not close around. I suspected the meaning had as much to do with Amanda as with Christ. However, she would say no more and I'd learned not to pump her, so I thanked her and made my way to my quarters.

  In the cool black of the grove I stood and stretched. It had been a long day. A day like no other. And it was just the beginning.

  Upstairs in the Zillers' bedroom, lights went on. I found myself smiling. “Soon you'll show me your secrets,” I said to the figures silhouetted against the drapes. “The Corpse will see to that.”

  Then I slipped into the garage, where I had stashed four raw weenies and a pint of beet juice.

  John Paul Ziller is six and a half feet tall and wears a bone in his nose. He is seldom mistaken for anyone else. The agents can't understand why he has not been nabbed. Neither can I. For the law enforcers have made fine advances in their art. Technology has served them as dutifully as it has served industry. With laboratories, computers, chemical formulae, vast electronic communications networks, college-trained triggermen and millions of informers at its disposal, should law enforcement fail to locate and apprehend a jungle-bred magician, a notorious athlete-outlaw, a ninety-pound baboon and the body of Christ—all traveling together in one convenient package—then it must reconcile itself to a failure of the magnitude of the collapse of Ford or the inability of Standard Oil to turn a profit.

  With all my meat and blood and breath, I am rooting for the success of the magician's trick. But the noise of hope is not a racket in my heart.

  Meanwhile, Amanda goes about her business. Which is? Which is, if I am honest, what this report is all about. Which is, at the moment, the perfection of the techniques of trance. She falls effortlessly into the trance state now, turning on the “voices” with no more difficulty than turning on the eleven o'clock news. But she always gets the same advice: “Expect a letter.”

  Therefore, Amanda is awaiting a letter. I am not. How could a letter reach us here? I've explained how the agents intercept our mail. Besides, would John Paul be such a ninny as to reveal his whereabouts to the Post Office? Ridiculous idea, a letter. All that is delivered to the roadhouse these days is rain. Air mail, special delivery, by the bagsful. How did so much rain get
our address?

  On Saturday morning, Salvadore Gladstone Tex banged at the door of the zoo. The cowboy may have had something valuable to sell, but nobody answered his knock. Later, Farmer Hansen came by, read our sign and departed. The sign said: Closed Until Monday. Since the Jeep was parked out front, Hansen probably wondered what was going on in here. He might have wondered if we were ill. Who could guess what Salvadore Gladstone Tex might have wondered. He galloped away on Jewish Mother, feeding his snot to the wind.

  I remained alone in my quarters that Saturday, Amanda and John Paul spent the day in their respective sanctuaries, and Purcell, providing he abided by the rules, spent it in the kitchen where he had spread his bedroll close to the pantry door. This was the day when we were to put all our energies into thinking about the Corpse.

  The weather was chilly and misty, so I neglected to open my window. Honestly, I didn't see how that could make any difference.

  Approximately two thousand years ago, a pellet of wisdom dropped into the fetid, heavy, squirming, gasping, bloody, bug-eyed, breast-beating, anguished, wrathful, greasy and inflamed world of Jewish-Oriental culture as a pearl might drop into a pail of sweat. CUT!

  His name was Yeshua ben Miriam, but history came to know him as Christ or Jesus. Sorry, sir, your face is familiar but just can't recall your name. CUT!

  After a career as a maker of wooden farming implements, Yeshua (or Jesus) was moved to become an itinerant rabbi and kicked up a local fuss with his fanatical adherence to a philosophy of brotherly love. His strength of character was incomparable, yet he was not the least bit original in his thought. In fact, he had only one real insight during his life (and even that one was commonplace in India and Tibet). When he came to understand that the Kingdom of Heaven is within, he lit up like a Christmas tree and illuminated Western civilization for twenty centuries. They nailed him up but they couldn't unplug him. CUT!

  On a Michigan funny farm there are three inmates, each of whom believes he is Jesus Christ. They are all correct, of course, but when they learned the secret—that everyone is divine if only he knows he is divine—they became confused and behaved in a manner that led them to the looney bin. Their culture hadn't prepared them for divine revelation. It hadn't even encouraged them to ask the only important question—"Who am I?"—let alone taught them to give the only logical reply. So when these three lower-middle-class working stiffs stumbled onto self-knowledge, they translated it into the absurd vision of the Sunday-school Superman, then wondered why they got locked up. Tough titty, boys. We prefer our God to be as singular as he is distant. CUT!

  A prophet in the Jewish tradition, Jesus had little truck with Gentiles. ("I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Matthew 15:24.) On at least one occasion he referred to Gentiles as dogs. He saw his mission as helping to bring about the fulfillment of Jewish aspirations—and that mission ended in a grotesque fiasco. He differed from the mainstream of Jewish thinking only in that he believed in loving one's enemies. A radical difference, to be sure, but he would have been appalled by the suggestion of a Gentile religion being founded in his name. He never intended to sponsor a church, let alone an Inquisition. CUT!

  JESUS: Hey, Dad.

  GOD: Yes, son?

  JESUS: Western civilization followed me home this morning. Can I keep it?

  GOD: Certainly not, boy. And put it down this minute. You don't know where it's been.

  CUT!

  The clown is a creature of chaos. His appearance is an affront to our sense of dignity, his actions a mockery of our sense of order. The clown (freedom) is always being chased by the policeman (authority). Clowns are funny precisely because their shy hopes lead invariably to brief flings of (exhilarating?) disorder followed by crushing retaliation from the status quo. It delights us to watch a careless clown break taboos; it thrills us vicariously to watch him run wild and free; it reassures us to see him slapped down and order restored. After all, we can condone liberty only up to a point. Consider Jesus as a ragged, nonconforming clown—laughed at, persecuted and despised—playing out the dumb show of his crucifixion against the responsible pretensions of authority. CUT!

  “Jesus, it's me, you know, the friendly with-it priest who puts your transcendental rap into the groovy idiom of the cool kids on the corner. Hey! Are you running with me, Jesus?”

  “Boy, I'm running with you, passing with you and kicking with you. And you're still losing.” CUT!

  For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that we might not perish but have everlasting . . . CUT!

  Jesus, there is practically no historic evidence of your existence. Jesus, the Gospel is mostly Greek myth, literary embellishments and publicity releases. Jesus, we know so little about you. Jesus, is it your absence that makes our hearts grow fonder? Jesus, we don't have you, we have abstractions the Church has woven around your name. Jesus, you are a mystery. All mysteries, however mundane, have the stink of God about them. Jesus, is that your game? CUT!

  When Jesus overturned the bankers' tables and kicked the capitalists out of the temple, he momentarily succumbed to the temptation to indulge in violent revolution in the cause of freedom. He did not persist in this behavior. Although he remained a rebel, Jesus was to support a revolution in consciousness rather than a violent overthrow of corrupt establishment. For his trouble, he was hung up on spikes. Would his fate have been different had he persisted in militant opposition? For his refusal to pursue political goals, Jesus lost popular support—and gained a legacy. CUT!

  Over the strong red soil of Galilee he sailed like a boat. Picture him sailing past the feasts at which the men dance to melancholy music. Sailing through the olive orchards, through the vineyards where black grapes pout like moons. Sailing across the viaduct that spans Cheesemakers' Valley. Sailing up and down the slopes of ripening wheat. Sailing around the harp-shaped Lake of Galilee. Sailing through the heat, through the barking of dogs and the sawing of grasshoppers, through the herds of cud-chewing camels whose burdens bear scents of Eastern spices, through the crumbling villages where at dusk flitting bats frighten the women at the wells. And always, as he sailed, spouting his madness to his astonished disciples; his mad, extremist, unstructured, non-linear, poetic babble of forgiveness and love. CUT!

  Think-tankwise, it was not a good day for me. I approached the image of Jesus from various and unlikely directions, as the director of East River Institute would have had me do, but I had trouble concentrating on any single aspect for more than a minute or two. I lost sight of my best ideas as one loses sight of a friend in a crowd, my mind roamed in unmentionable directions, and on a half-dozen occasions I must confess that I dozed off.

  Toward nightfall—and without recalling that Amanda had advised me to do so—I raised a window, hoping that a spurt of fresh air would clear my cerebrum. I reclined on my bed and permitted the dank but feathery Skagit atmosphere to wash over me. Its shadowy body and its fir-odored volume of ancient vapors descended upon me and, with salty quivers, activated forgotten imprints into vivid experience.

  Jesus was sitting on a rock in the desert, meditating and reading the Law, when Tarzan came riding up on a goat. Tarzan was munching nutmeg seeds and playing the harmonica. “Hi, Jesus,” he yelled.

  Jesus jumped like he was stung by a scorpion. “You startled me,” he stammered. “I thought at first you were Pan.”

  Tarzan chuckled. “I can understand why that put you uptight. When you were born, the cry went through the world, 'Great Pan is dead.' But as you can plainly see, I'm hairy all over like an ape. Pan was a shaggy beast from the waist down. Above his belly button he was a lot like you.”

  A shudder vibrated Jesus' emaciated frame. “Like me?” he asked. “No, you must be mistaken. Say, what's that you're eating?”

  “Nutmeg seeds,” said Tarzan, grinning. “Here, I'll lay some on you.”

  “Oh, no thanks,” said Jesus. “I'm fasting.” Saliva welled up in his mouth. He pressed his lips together forcefull
y, but one solitary trickle broke over the flaky pink dam and dripped in an artless pattern into his beard. “Besides, nutmeg seeds: aren't they a narcotic?”

  “Well, they'll make you high, if that's what you mean. Why else do you think I'm gumming them when I've got dates, doves and a crock of lamb stew in my saddle bag? If you ask me, you could use a little something to get you off.”

  At the mention of lamb stew, Jesus had lost control of his lake of spittle. Now he wiped his chin with a dusty sleeve, embarrassment coloring his dark cheeks as the rosy-fingered dawn colors so many passages of Homer. “No, no,” he said emphatically. “John the Baptist turned me on with mandrake root once. It was a rewarding experience, but never again.” He shielded his eyes against the radiant memory of his visions. “Now, I'm what you might call naturally stoned.”

  Tarzan, who had climbed off his goat, smiled and said, “Good for you.” He sat down beside Jesus and mouthed his harmonica. A jungle blues. “You gotta blow a C-vamp to get a G sound on one of these,” he said. He did it.

  Obviously distracted, Jesus interrupted. “What did you mean when you said that Pan was a lot like me?”

  “Only from the waist up,” corrected Tarzan. “Above the waist Pan was a highly spiritual dude. He sang and played sweeter than the larks; and his face was as full of joy as a sunny meadow in spring. There was a lot of love in that crazy rascal, just as there's a lot in you. Of course, he had horns, you know. And cloven hooves. Good golly, Miss Molly, how those woolly legs of his could dance! But he stunk, Pan did. In rutting season you could smell him a mile away. And he'd take on anything. He would've screwed this nanny goat if he couldn't find a nymph.” Tarzan laughed and ran the scale on his harmonica.