The Death and Life of Zebulon Finch, Volume 2

by Daniel Kraus

  “Whoa, whoa! You guys cool?”

  I knew by the muffled reverberation that it was Captain America behind a closed helmet. Strong young arms encircled my chest. I was hoisted to my feet and swiveled around. The boy threw open his visor, checked me for damage, and found so much of it, he could only gawk. His pupils were dilated from some unknown ingestible, but climacteric concern had him focused.

  “Can’t you hear the PA, X-Man? They’re calling for you!”

  To facilitate anguish, the rain pattered to a standstill.

  “Zebulon X to the stage, last call. C’mon, brother, where are you?”

  Captain America waggled a finger toward Woodstock.

  “We gotta go! Now, now, now!”

  He snatched the book from my hand, wedged it into my rucksack, slung the bag over his shoulder, looped his arm around my chest, and lurched for open skies. Drugs had lent the scrawny kid a muscleman’s brawn, and we were outside the tent before my brain could collect a thought. I dug my heels into mud, halting our progress, and looked back at Church with the same panicked plea he’d given me when his copper cheek had disgraced him before a Coney Island prostitute.

  Though the rain had quit, the wind had not, and the tent flap had blown so that I could see only Church’s withered white hands shaking from want of book to hold or head to pet. Then that vision was gone too, as Captain America lugged me to a stage jack-o’-lantern orange inside a purpled night, where roadies were clearing the stairs so we could pass, clapping encouragement and gesturing us onto the wing, where stood the four boys I’d paid earlier to build my set, who hoorahed upon recognizing me and pointed at their stage dressing, which I saw only after Captain America handed me my rucksack and pushed me toward it: a hill of bundled sticks upon a bed of dry straw from which rose a wooden stake they’d somehow bolted to the stage.

  XIII.

  NOT IN THE GREAT WAR’S biggest battles, Harlem’s jumpingest jazz joints, Hollywood’s priciest premieres, or Mauthausen’s sweatiest stockade had I seen a crowd like this. It flowed from the stage like Lake Michigan, miles and miles of flesh glistening under the gelled lights. It was eleven thirty, but no one slept; they were sunburnt, underfed, underhydrated, and underexcreted, yet high on hope and drugged on a dream that, for two more days at least, would persist.

  The motions of martyrdom had grown mechanical. I advanced toward the microphone waiting at center stage, the underfoot crunch of straw amplified through speakers. For a moment, I was dumb in the spotlight. Then, as if winded like a clock, my hand dug into the rucksack, reached beneath the Stavros, and removed a can of lighter fluid. I bit off the cap, squirted the liquid upon the tinder—just like Hendrix, I told myself. The gray stake soaked black; the yellow hay soaked brown. I let the can drop, and it clanged like a cymbal. The people, trained to respond to sound, cheered.

  Make these years mean something, Scheinberg had said.

  Keep going, Church had said.

  Were they opposite directives? Or one and the same? My hand shook like Church’s as I took from a box of matches a single exemplar, did the one-handed trick of running it across graphite, and held the flame before me. The people were also trained to respond to fire—ignited draft cards, burned bras, napalm firestorms—and cheered with confidence that they were going to witness a purging inferno. They were right, though only those who recognized me guessed that the firestarter himself would burn with it.

  The flame slid down the matchstick. Drop it, Zebulon—all you have to do is drop it. I shifted focus from the fire’s unspoiled center to the filthy horde. A change in stage lighting had rolled a bright yellow beam up the center of the hill as if by paintbrush, and I looked from face to eager face; one unkind jeer or violent scuffle was all the encouragement I needed to go through with it. Instead, over and over, I found the miracle the Woodstock Music & Art Fair planners had promised in their circulars: peace.

  The match-flame scorched my thumb, woke me up. Yes, it was time to burn like Willie Pete, like Agent Orange; burn like Vietnam, like the ghettos of Harlem, Watts, and Newark; to everything—burn, burn, burn—there is a season—burn, burn, burn. I pivoted to set my spine against the stake, my fingers poised to drop the match onto the lustful tinder. But in that instant my eye caught sight of what looked like a mirror fire out in the crowd.

  It was, in point of fact, an Afro hairdo backlit by a tower spotlight so that it sizzled like a burning bush. Most of the Afro-Americans at Woodstock, it seemed to me, were musicians, making this a sight just unusual enough to distract me while my thumb roasted from brown to black. The Afro was prodigious and perfectly orbed, miniaturizing the face beneath: scared, wide-eyed, and, oddly enough, familiar.

  The match disintegrated to ash.

  I moved from the stake, leaned into the mike.

  “Jolami Tiombe?”

  My voice crashed through speakers like thunder.

  She was perhaps thirty rows back, close enough that I could see her cover her mouth with both hands. As I expect the best melodies come to songwriters, the path forward came to me all at once, clearer to the heart than any other I’d taken. Before he’d faded into the night and mud and years, Church had found this trail as surely as he’d found a hundred others as a Marine Corps runner, and it was one down which all of us had to keep walking.

  I only knew two words and kept at them:

  “Jolami Tiombe. Jolami Tiombe.”

  Had she come to Woodstock to see me? Or had she come simply for the love of music? It didn’t matter. She followed my voice as if the old noose around my neck were connected to a rope around her waist. Her hips and shoulders bumped past others, and in true festival spirit, they cleared the way. When she reached the press barrier, teenagers lifted her over it, at which point security personnel, having nothing else to do, raised her by the calves so that she appeared to levitate to the stage. Suddenly she was next to me, clad not in Black Panther garb but simple black slacks and a shirt, her eyes full, for some reason, with tears, her slender brown arms lifting, not in allegiance to a cause but to embrace me. I could not move, but heard the mike hiss as it was pressed between us.

  The applause was staggering. The two of us parted to look at each other. Though her hair gave her several inches, she still had to look up to meet my eyes, which she did with confusion and exhilaration. She knew which masters of war I’d served over the past two years and how I’d thrown ideals to the wind. But hadn’t Bob Dylan said that things were blowin’ in the wind? Well, now they were blowin’ back.

  I crossed to a stage-right wing filled with musicians watching the drama play out, and I made a one-word request. Melanie held out hers; Arlo Guthrie, on deck, offered his; but it was a portly, hirsute guy named Jerry Garcia who was the first to hand me a guitar. He was from a band called the Grateful Dead, a phrase which, at that moment, described me well enough.

  Captain America was scurrying from the stage. Clever kid—he’d delivered a chair. Jolami Tiombe, too stunned to stand, sat. I lowered the microphone and handed her Garcia’s guitar. She studied its construction as if it were an anachronistic object unearthed by archeologists. With rapid movements that surprised even her, she passed the strap over her Afro, rested the body upon her knee, and raced her fingertips noiselessly up the neck.

  In Ritchie’s hospital she’d assailed me for telling the tale of America as only a rich white man could, as a tale of annihilation. But there was another tale to be told, and no one could tell it better than a good lyricist.

  I took a second match from the box, lit it, and tossed it to the kindling, and after that removed the noose from my neck and added it to the tinder; it would bind me to a martyr’s futility no longer. The flame that took was not large, but ran with Woodstockian wind, and by the time I’d reached the left wing, the tiny figure on the stage had become the eye of a generational fire, so blazing hot that even the film crews stopped shooting so that they could stand back.

  “I’m Jolami Tiombe.” She cleared her throat. “Or Bunny Tuck
er? Of the Beau-Ts?”

  No music was passé to this crowd. They whooped.

  “And I guess I’m going to play you a song.”

  Her left fingers found frets, her right hand hovered over the hole.

  She looked over her shoulder to find that she was all alone, that I’d left her, likely forever, and in a position of utmost vulnerability. From afar, through flames, she found me. I held her gaze as one might hold a loved one’s hand before the train departed, and then submerged myself into shadow. Her position did not have to be vulnerable, thought I, not if she hit that first chord hard enough.

  She raised a Black Power fist and guessed, correctly, that I would see it.

  There are suns one dare not stare at directly, lest one’s retinas scorch. I hurried off, pushing past humanoid shapes. Behind me, above me, all around me, Bunny Tucker played the only song she ever wrote, denuded of its Motown varnish and whittled to its heartwood. In a voice rubbed raw by a half-decade screaming for justice, she sang, and in that coarse crackle everyone could hear a gospel, and the numbers of those saved by it would reach higher than fifty-one. Bunny’s tune had become a eulogy for the almost-chart-topping radio version of the song as much as it was for an older, shinier, but not quite lost version of the nation.

  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 . . .”

  I’d sampled no brown acid, and yet my senses of sight, smell, taste, and touch had gone misty. By the time I located Church’s tent and found not so much as a wheelchair rut, the only sense still working was sound. I found my aviators, put them on despite the dark, turned toward the wet grass of the back field, and began to walk, my feet finding the rhythm of Bunny’s final verse, sung in the rapture of one who remembered, the instant her fingertips touched steel strings, that a little girl’s dreams only die when that little girl quits dreaming, a rapture that made you believe that Amerika could still be America if we all sang the same words.

  Old Mr. Finch,

  Across the land he goes.

  No rope, no bullet, no gun

  Can stop him because he knows . . .

  That him and her and you and me

  Are the same as we can be

  And though there’ll be dusk before the dawn

  Old Mr. Finch keeps ramblin’ on . . .

  PART ELEVEN

  1970–1984

  A Discourse On Megalomania And The Doctrine Of Ecstatic Consumption; Or, The Savages’ Fifteen Minutes of Fame—Bon Appétit.

  I.

  THE DEAREST READER’S DOGGED FIDELITY is rewarded: Here is your bone.

  It is possible that first seeing the name “Zebulon Finch” upon this anthology of notebooks excited you for one reason: the Canyon Diablo Catastrophe, as the papers put it; Death in the Desert, as ABC titled their antiseptic Movie of the Week; or simply the Savage Tragedy, which has nosed ahead as history’s favorite. The state-funded obelisk holding the memorial plaque was cut, or so I understand, from black quartz, and though civilization may have vaporized by your time, I wager that the obelisk still stands out there in the desert, bearing blinkless witness to all those who perished.

  The rolled joint of the Love Decade burned to a roach after the cultural orgasm of Woodstock, first with the Altamont Free Concert in December, an attempt at duplicating three days of peace and music that instead resulted in dozens of injuries and four deaths, including a stabbing by a Hell’s Angel security guard while Mick Jagger sludged through a jittery rendition of “Under My Thumb.” The killer’s blade was long. It punctured America’s lungs, and the wheezing, coughing, blood-spitting end came from the icons who’d otherwise howled: Hendrix, Joplin, and Morrison, all stiff and cold from overdoses in under a year.

  Everyone, stay away from the brown acid, all right?

  Who, though, could blame Jimmy, Janis, and Jim for exiting the stage prior to the inevitable, exhausting encores? In November 1969, these musicians had read the same confessions everyone else had of U.S. infantrymen who’d rounded up children in the Vietnam village of My Lai and unloaded carbine clips into their soft bodies before rolling them into ravines, a behavior to which, if memory serves, we’d made it a point to object when the SS had done it to Jews. After My Lai, what true believer didn’t fill his syringe with experimental cocktails half-hoping it would be her or his last?

  Yet the anguish might have stayed locked inside nightmare cages had it not been for a fidgety creeper named Charles Manson, who disassembled the mass-printed and primetime-televised fable that we all ought to grin and go buy the world a Coke.

  The Coke, it turned out, was tainted.

  What shook me, Reader, was that I’d known Charles Manson. Indeed, our shared ghost moments made Chuck and me almost brothers. While I’d watched Ritchie Tucker bleed out in New York City, Chuck had been strolling out of a San Pedro, California, prison after a six-year sentence for pimping and parole violation. We were as geographically distant from each other as possible in the contiguous U.S., yet we snapped together like magnets. Secondhand guitar slung across his back, Chuck, daydreaming of a record deal, bused himself to San Fran’s hippie mecca of Haight-Ashbury, one of the most popular sites of my martyrdoms in the country.

  Am I imagining that it was Chuck who enthusiastically shook my hand after multiple staged deaths? Or was it just one of the hundreds like him, verbose, greasy-bearded would-be musician-prophets? I am certain Chuck watched me die at least once, certain that he wrote a song about it, certain that he strummed that song at the tumbleweed estate of his incipient, insipid “Family,” where, by all published reports, he pretended to be me, faux-crucifying himself so his followers could play apostle and weep upon his feet, before orgying toward his resurrection. Even then, he pined for the attention given to Zebulon X, and so dragged his dreams, screaming and bleeding, into reality.

  Yes, I might have inspired Charles Manson.

  But in the end, as you shall see, he inspired me.

  Woodstock’s daybreak rain was sheeting when I found my dirt road escape path blocked by the least forgiving of crossing guards. It was Ruthie Ness, recognizable not only for the umbrella she alone among thousands had had the foresight to pack, but also her genteel ensemble of wool coat and black trousers. Lodged into her free elbow like Church’s football was her cherished golden lockbox. With a mind toward symbolism, she’d waited for me at the choke point of an intersection, shoulders hunched against the chill, the steam from her skin the manifestation of her fury.

  By contrast I was as pommeled and mudded as the road itself. Though I stood at a four-way junction, fewer routes than ever before were available. In relinquishing the spotlight to Bunny, Zebulon X had been effectively cremated, and unfastened from my noose at last, I was jetsam tossed by wayward waves. Oh, how I hated being wet; thus, I lost our game of chicken.

  “It is a shame you traveled so far,” said I. “You, who dislikes music.”

  “I can’t believe you did this,” hissed she.

  “But I didn’t. Behold: I am unburnt.”

  “Not that. I mean that you did it for free.”

  I laughed. My capitalist keeper never disappointed.

  “Word will get out,” continued she. “How do you expect Excelsior, Inc., to stay in the black?”

  “I’ve been reminded other things are more important. I’m through. Step aside.”

  “You’re through when I say you’re through.”

  “Do not make me force you, woman.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m doing. Force me. Let’s see how you do it.”

  Stavros’s A Ghost Rolls Over was too bloated by rain to serve as bludgeon. Gamely I looked about for other blunt objects, but our podunk environs offered nothing. Only the lockbox had the heft to serve as cudgel, and I’d never pry that from Ruthie’s talons. The rain ha
rdened, exploding upward from brown puddles. I wiped my face and glared. The ruminative mood in which Bunny had left me was curling away like burnt parchment.

  “Go ahead, follow me. You are flesh and blood, if barely, and eventually you will sleep. And then I shall desert you, just as I did two nights ago. And I shall do it again, and again, and again, until your big, ugly shoes brim with blood from constant chase.”

  Had a forked tongue lashed out of Ruthie Ness’s mouth, I would have been less surprised than I was by what happened. Her proud chin receded. The corners of her straight lips downturned. Her bun, strained from unusual facial flexings, released tendrils that, when isolated, looked soft and vulnerable. Her thick lenses fogged.

  My dagger had at last struck not unyielding bone but live flesh.

  “Are you—Miss Ness? Are you . . . crying?”

  Her hands full, she thumped aside tears with a shoulder.

  “You dahn’t understahnd.”

  Her Boston accent was spiritless. To my shock, it dejected me. Somewhere along the long line we’d scribbled across America, I’d come to rely upon Ruthie’s tenacity, if nothing else.

  “How could I?” asked I. “You are as inscrutable as a Sphinx.”

  “I’m out heah . . . I’m with you at all because . . .”

  Runners of rain sluiced across the underbelly of the umbrella, each bead attaching to her face like a wart. To shove past this shrew, realized I, would be to fling her to the ground, after which she’d be dotted by a million more warts and rashed by a pox of mud. How could I do such a thing at the moment when she’d become halfway human, and a moment after I’d been touched by Woodstock’s brotherly love? I searched the rain. Not a single soaked hippie was in sight. The planet, miserably, was our own.