The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  They might have noticed Ruthie Ness, though, trying to collect payment from zoned-out dopers. Hey, mama, I don’t have the dough, but how ’bout you let me turn you on to these mushrooms? She swallowed stiffed bills when it was the only option, and I became ashamed, both of the behavior of my supposed compatriots and of the vulgarities to which I subjected the straightbacked Miss Ness, no matter that she had no affection for me.

  Mere hours after the milestone broadcast during which television patriarch Walter Cronkite opined that America should abrogate its role in the Vietnam quagmire, Ruthie and I returned to the library study room at William & Mary College, where she had set up temporary office. She gathered typewritten drafts of Zebulon X press releases and began bleeding them with red pen, while just outside the window, young people achieved bliss in drum circles, boys had their ring-knuckled hands down the backs of girls’ bell-bottomed pants, and bags of this or that were traded in clear view.

  “A productive telephone call with the Young Americans for Freedom,” said she. “They’re interested in having you out to California at a rally for Governor Reagan.”

  “Reagan, eh?” sighed I. “I thought he was of a conservative bent.”

  “I’ve been aggressive with terms, and the YAF has been responsive. I’ll make a final counter-offer, but regardless I think we should go ahead.”

  “The YAF—yes, now it bangs a distant gong. Doesn’t the YAF support the war? I don’t understand.”

  Ruthie spoke to me as if I were an underdeveloped child.

  “The YAF has money, and money means visibility. Isn’t that what you want? To graduate from parking lots and gazebos to reach the most people?”

  “Yes, within reason.”

  She folded her arms. “What about the offer is unreasonable, precisely? I wasn’t aware that your goal was to push one particular set of beliefs over another.”

  I wanted to splutter in indignation, but could not, for Ruthie, as usual, was right. From my first martyrdom onward, I’d swung as does a tick from hither blade of grass to thither, latching to the nearest warm body regardless of blood type. Ergo, it became easier to convince myself that engaging the other half of America wasn’t the same as giving up on my fellow youth. Not all young people, after all, rebelled from the backs of Volkswagen vans. Some picked up pennies from maple-syruped diner counters to support newborn children. Some made change at banks in hopes of a promotion to assistant manager. Even some of the pigs we skirmished, once their riot helmets were knocked off, were too young to cultivate the mandated mustaches. Ruthie Ness, it seemed, understood the dire duties of a Better God more clearly than I, and it made me sad, Reader, sadder than I’d been in decades.

  For hadn’t there been a brief, shining moment, before the hippies had succumbed to the sex-and-drug trappings of their cause, when America’s decay had nearly been reversed?

  “Call the YAF,” whispered I.

  Click-click went the briefcase locks, ruffle-fuffle went the pockets.

  “I’ve got the number right here.”

  Unlike overindulged hippies, the Young Americans for Freedom were excited to book a show-stopper like Zebulon X and treated me graciously. They had combed hair and bright eyes. They wore, depending on the situation, double-breasted suits, polo-neck sweaters, tennis shirts, ankle socks, or white cotton caps. They studied at Purdue, Cornell, Brigham Young, Texas A&M. They donated blood for wounded soldiers. They loved their country—love it or leave it, they said. They nodded soberly at my martyrdoms rather than cheering them, construing them not as commentary on the folly of sacrifice, but as straightforward passion plays.

  I died. I revived. I waited to feel something.

  At some point, I cannot say when, I began wearing a suit. It was Ruthie’s doing. The new duds played better to my new audience. I forgot my copy of Foxe’s Book of Martyrs at Rutgers College and did not bother acquiring a replacement. No one cared. I simply killed myself, for the YAF, or the John Birch Society, or the American Independent Party, in manners devoid of historical nuance or really any meaning at all, by gun or knife or, laziest of all, the noose still dangling round my neck, repeating the same steps I’d gone through at the Biloxi hanging: Loop, tuck, stretch, tighten. I brought in enough people to make my bookings worthwhile, and dimly I was cognizant of Ruthie’s new, bigger, gold-painted lockbox, the crisper ledgers and personalized checkbooks, the pocket calculator which had to be replaced after the plus and equal signs wore out.

  You endure enough needles, you stop feeling them—that much I remembered from being the Astonishing Mr. Stick. In April, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated one day after making a speech I’d heard on the radio, in which he’d said in bittersweet tones, “I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you.” Nonviolence itself died that day. Within hours, eighty riots erupted across the country. Who needed a fake martyr when real ones were born every week? The Black Panthers cranked them out as if Ritchie Tucker had been their prototype: Lil’ Bobby Hutton, unarmed, shot by police; John Huggins plugged in the back during a government-planned fracas; Bunchy Carter, the same story, except in the chest. On June 6—the fifty-year anniversary of the Belleau Wood bloodbath—Bobby Kennedy died, shot in the head like his brother, and even the Radical Right grew worried. The idealists’ collapse was too epic; it felt like another Götterdämmerung.

  I was not in Chicago for the 1968 Democratic Convention. Why would I be? Steered as if by bull’s nose ring by Ruthie, I was somewhere where they played Pat Boone instead of Pink Floyd, where the keynoter, George Wallace himself, shouted about the grand old days I’d lived through but remembered quite differently, when there weren’t, said he, all these niggers invading our hometowns, much less dinks or gooks or slopes or zips or whatever you called the Orientals. The rally took place at night, and by then every radio and TV was tuned to the mess in Chicago, where the police (not pigs in this crowd) were controlling (not beating) the bums (not conscientious objectors) with billy clubs and asphyxiant. I could feel the baton against bone, the corrosive flesh-peel of the gas. Before the channel was turned, I caught an interview with Allen Ginsberg of “Howl” infamy; he was on the spot in Chicago, still hunting for the “starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” which could not be me, which could have never been me.

  I did my thing, then trailed after Ruthie through the crowd. Her golden lockbox was heavy that night, and it slowed her, and it was for that reason alone that I noticed him. Not five feet away stood a man in his early twenties, a cigarette popping from his mouth, arm slung along the shoulders of a woman who looked to be his wife. She was pregnant and poured into a hotel maid uniform, while he wore a grease-smutched mechanic’s jumpsuit. I don’t know that I would have recognized his face if the jumpsuit hadn’t offered his nickname on an oval patch:

  Junior

  We were in Kansas. Outside of Wichita. These details, blathered earlier by Ruthie, sharpened. My foot caught a tuft of turf. I tripped. Junior’s wife looked my way, and he looked at her. I hid my face and arm stub, even though I knew that it wasn’t physical deficiencies that shamed me. I’d let Rigby haul me to NASA so that I might help protect Junior’s future, and I’d become a Better God for much the same reason. Yet what had I done with Junior’s Kal-El gifts but squander them? I shouldered past Ruthie and bulled headlong into the masses, hearing in my head not their conservative rallying cries but one from the alleged peaceniks: We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against! It was a dirty lie: all of us, no matter the age, were exactly the same.

  The last time I saw Harvey Scheinberg was November 6, 1968, the day after Nixon won the presidency. Ruthie Ness and I were at a diner on the Ohio State campus, where short-order cooks threw water onto their grills to cover the disturbing silence of students weighing the ramifications of the Nixon win. Ruthie, always ready to talk business, looked up from her calculator and coffee at his approach, but I held up my hand to request that she hold her tongue. Scheinberg stood in a downcast slouch, one hand holding
a wrinkled copy of The Warren Report, the other dug into his poncho pocket. His face was hidden by a werewolf knot of beard and hair.

  I wished to stand and meet his eyes. Instead I gazed up like a scolded dog.

  “I am sorry,” said I.

  “About what, man?”

  I shrugged. “The election?”

  He discovered in his pocket a joint and rolled it across his palm.

  “Yeah, bummer. But Humphrey wasn’t our man. Nothing was going to change.”

  Nixon had won by a sliver, less than one percent of the vote, and I, loathsome carpetbagger, had demonstrated to help it happen. Scheinberg knew it, and I found myself aching to hear him lay into me (as hippies said) and tear me a new one (as hippies also said). Why else had he left his table of funked freethinkers?

  “Got my draft notice,” said he.

  This wasn’t the chastisement I needed.

  “What? How? I thought you burned your card.”

  “Symbolic gesture. You think they let you off that easy?”

  Scheinberg stared out the window. The morning was idyllic. He spoke softly as if afraid his strident voice might disturb the butterflies, the squirrels, the very rays of light.

  “Do me a favor, man. Stay tuned in, all right? No matter what happens with the war, no matter what side you end up on, you keep tripping on your trip. The rest of us, the whole generation, we might end up gone with the wind. But you, man. You may look like shit, but you’re purer than any of us. Remember what we fought for, all right? Make these years mean something.”

  Purity. I’d glimpsed it in Montana, chased it into the solar system, died the deaths of a thousand martyrs hoping to find it stashed beneath my ribs. Now this scruffy liberationist had ambled up and suggested it was sitting right there in my surviving hand as the joint was in his?

  “What are you going to do?” asked I.

  He ran a hand through his whiskers. “Who knows? Might feel good to lose this hair.”

  Harvey Scheinberg had always traveled like a hobo with nothing more than what fit into a backpack. The notion of him plodding through the jungle in sateen drabs, cargo trousers, combat boots, helmet, insect mesh, pistol belt, ammo pouch, canteen, mess kit, fragmentation vest, and M16 was as deplorable as that of the free beasts of the Rocky Mountains hauling about carts of coal.

  “You have more connections than anyone else I know. Run away. To Canada, to Mexico. It could be”—I was desperate; here went nothing—“groovy.”

  He stared at me, then laughed. “Don’t ever say that word again, man.”

  His knuckles were white around The Warren Report. His jaw flexed, as if he might weep, then flexed harder as he conquered the emotion with minutemen of indignation. He lifted both eyes and voice toward my business partner.

  “Hey, lady. Why do you do it, huh?”

  Ruthie Ness looked up from her work and adjusted her glasses. Her poised smile did not alter, though her jaw, like his, tensed.

  “Because the stupid deserve to follow the bold.”

  With one stab, Scheinberg’s knife had struck truer than my untold attempts. It was the most revealing remark Ruthie had ever made, even as it presented varied interpretations. Were the stupid the American people, and the bold Richard Nixon? Or were both Ruthie and I the bold and liberals like Scheinberg the stupid ones? Or did anyone who paid me to martyr myself qualify as stupid?

  Scheinberg raspberried his tongue, backpedaled toward his table of likeminded, likefleshed losers, and grinned the garrulous grin of one ignorant of coming disaster. Nixon’s election would mean five more years in Vietnam, new campaigns in Laos and Cambodia, and tens of thousands more killed. Scheinberg would accept both his draft and the complimentary buzzcut, train at Fort Ord, join Charlie Company at Qui Nhon, and die by friendly fire within a week of deployment. There is a five-hundred-foot-long wall in Washington, D.C., if that capital city still exists in the Reader’s time, where persistent sorts can browse the names of the Vietnam War’s dead. I only wish that my name could be found among them. Carved into a slab of rock—what a clean means of immortality.

  Scheinberg flashed the peace sign.

  “That’s one crazy chick you got there,” said he. “You ride easy, Zebulon X.”

  XI.

  THE SCHOOL BUS WAS CLASSIC mustard yellow but painted with green segments of reptilian skin and topped with meniscus pupils inked onto the headlights. Half of the windows were busted and covered with plywood, the other half thrown open to accommodate young people’s braceleted arms. These limbs wiggled like centipedal legs, giving an impression of movement to the Alligator Express (the name emblazoned on both sides), even after the bus had slowed almost to a standstill.

  So went the story of the friendliest traffic jam in history. If you didn’t count the sporadic chunk of engine dropping from the bus’s undercarriage, the ride had been smooth until sundown two hours earlier, when the interstates had dribbled off into rural byways incapable of handling this magnitude of influx, everything from cars, trucks, and motorcycles to bicycles, skateboards, and hitchers. The congestion had given the night an illusory edge, with sulfurous exhaust and road dust turned scarlet by so many brake lights.

  The back of the Alligator Express was painted with a lizard tail, implying crude things about the missing exit door. From it, four or five bibulous teenagers belted along to music coming from competing car radios, currently a battle royale between Led Zeppelin, Iron Butterfly, and the Velvet Underground. I, too, crowded the bus’s asshole, but in my case to hop off.

  With my rucksack slung across my chest, I began dodging pedestrians at a far quicker clip than traffic. Despite the unreckonable crowds and diesel reek, I was alone for the first time in years and savored knowing, at last, where a Better God had to go.

  Make these years mean something, Scheinberg had pleaded, and a way to do that began to manifest after I caught television footage from the Monterey Pop Festival of an Afro-American instrumentalist named Jimi Hendrix feigning sex with his guitar before ejaculating onto it a can of lighter fluid and setting it ablaze. Perhaps it was the Coltranesque cacophony of his band or Hendrix’s shivers of ecstasy, but I found in the white-hot flame what both Scheinberg and I had sought. Fire is the purest matter that exists; even the shadow-blasted cremains of Hiroshima had allowed, for an instant, the whole world to see its true shape.

  The irony that a martyr had forgotten fire was biting indeed. It was long past time to plant a stake, stand against it, and burn. Foxe lavished his most plauditory pages upon those like John Hooper, Bishop of Worchester, who in 1555 was fastened with detonative munitions and thrice set on fire, an ordeal throughout which he prayed aloud with blistered tongue and beat upon his chest until his hand spurted blood and his arm fell off. I was two steps ahead of him—no blood to boil, no arm to lose. As long as my fire-light flashed hope upon watching faces, I’d have served my purpose nearly as well as Thích Quang Đúc.

  What I required was the right kind of stage in front of the right kind of eyes. While Ruthie trawled me to pro-war events via bus, rental, and rail, I kept my eyes to public bulletin boards, where subversive handbills still made their cases, and stapled to one of the latter I saw a notice for a concert in Wallkill, New York, called “3 Days of Peace & Music” put on by a consortium called Woodstock Music & Art Fair.

  The copy advertised one hundred acres of lush Hudson Valley nature, a bustling crafts bazaar, workshops in bead-stringing and clay-throwing and poetry-penning, and a whopping three-day ticket price of eighteen bucks. What caught my eye, though, was that among the three dozen listed performers was the arson artist himself, Mr. Hendrix.

  Ruthie Ness walked too fast for me to swipe the leaflet, but that did not matter, for my plans were grander than scoring tickets. I capitalized on private moments, working with New York City phone operators to connect me with the Woodstock troupe, to whom I described my résumé. The festival site, said they, had changed to a six-hundred acre dairy farm in the Catskills, but the happenin
g, man, was happening, and swelling with performers by the day, and with so many artists needing to set up, it was a good bet they could use filler between sets—they’d already booked some sessions of kundalini yoga. I insisted that I be added to the docket and furthermore that I go unpaid, the latter of which, I’m sure, clinched the deal. If you’re cool mellowing out backstage until a space opens up, said they, then far out, cowboy, we’ll catch you in August.

  My emphatic request was that my name be excluded from all publicity materials. The Woodstock staff, however, was overwhelmed and probably high, and I lived in fear that Ruthie Ness would learn of my involvement and demand egregious payment from the festival, or, much worse, get wind of what I intended to do and kibosh the whole thing.

  I could have left her at any time, but my best shot was to reduce the time Ruthie had to track me down, and that meant cutting it close. Two nights before Woodstock’s kickoff, I crept from the Lexington, Kentucky, motel at which we lodged and boarded a red-eye bus to Scranton, Pennsylvania, where I purchased critical tools, stashed them in my rucksack, and schlepped through lakeland country until, after half a day, my path crossed an artery of jerry-built jalopies so obviously owned by Bohemians that I was able to insinuate myself aboard one of the more crowded vehicles, the Alligator Express.

  Through a muggy morning steam I veered from the roadsides, wheat fields, and church lots, all of which had become Gordian knots of improvised parking, and crested a hill to discover a downsloping natural amphitheater. The grass was visible only in patches; already tens of thousands of young people had arrived, and their bee-hive drone shook through me—or was it a flutter of nerves?

  For there stood the final theater of Zebulon X, a massive, bare-bones wooden stage surrounded by spotlight towers.

  That I wore a Ruthie-approved shirt-and-jacket combo did not help my cause at the gate. My plaid blazer made it look as though I’d come to peddle insurance. It was a sixteen-year-old volunteer in cut-off jeans and a stars-and-stripes motorcycle helmet who saved the day, recalling that he’d seen my name on a list somewhere, sometime, someplace, in this plane of reality or the next. (He was stoned.)