Another Roadside Attraction (17 page)
There was a time when Americans stayed put. For the majority of them, journeys were short and few. Consequently, their live entertainment came to them. The circus, the carnival, the dog-and-pony show, the wild West extravaganza, the freak show, the medicine wagon, the menagerie, brought to the towns and villages on their muddy itineraries glimpses of worlds which the sedentary folks had never visited; not just ethnic and geographical oddities but the worlds of romance and glamour and adventure and style. As we became urbanized and sophisticated and, above all, mobile—highly, highly mobile—the touring attractions naturally declined. That there is still potency in their imagery, fascination in their naive promise of magic, exotica and unknown quantities, is evident in the proliferation of roadside attractions. Today, the tawdry wonders do not come to us, we go to them.
Stop. Ahead. Five hundred yards. See. Camera bugs welcome. Fur Seal Caves. Rocks of Mystery. Frontier Village. Jungle Land. Reptile Farm (see them milk the diamond-backs). Indian Burial Mounds. Alligator Gardens. Swamp Creatures. Big Game Country. Little Africa. Bibletown. Old West Museum. Wild Animal Ranch (see rare white deer). The smell of gasoline and fatty hamburgers mingles with the shabby odors of half-starved mistreated animals. Milkshake blenders whine and jukeboxes jingle-jangle and toilets flush. Stop. The tourists stop, happy for an excuse to pull off the dangerous hot highways; a place for mommie and the kids to pee, a place to stretch the legs, reload the Kodak, mail postcards, buy cigarettes, drink a Coke, see. See. See something they've never seen before. Gila monster. King cobra. Billy the Kid's shootin' iron. Masturbating monkeys. Humpty Dumpty in papier mache. Or, in the case of the Capt. Kendrick Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Preserve, a flea circus and the meaning of meaning.
It is a hot dog stand. In all honesty, that is what (and nearly all) it is. A glorified hot dog stand. But the key word here is “glorified.” I must admit that for a lowly dispenser of frankfurters, it is an impressive establishment.
A giant hot dog is beached like a whale on the rooftop. It is made of painted wood and is surrounded by an entourage of painted figures in a painted landscape; by comets and peaks. The big sausage is the first thing one sees. It is visible for a mile around.
The yellow facade of the building—the architecture is in frontier style, including a tall false front—is polka-dotted with flat, silver, metallic weenies that borrow light from the elegant neon sign above and bend it into prismatic ripples. Apart from the luminous optical activity of the weenies, which is enjoyable in itself, the manner in which they are distributed over the rectilinear storefront bespeaks a stringent aesthetic that is fascinating to contemplate. What was the weenie-layer's compositional focus? What theory did he adhere to in arranging his modular elements (for that is what the weenies are) so that they would produce the degree of compositional interplay that they do? They seem almost musical in their arrangement. A symphony of silver sausages.
The windows—in front they are at ground level—are of colored glass: strange florid pictographs in which sausages turn into serpents and serpents turn into Arabic alphabets. Or are they Sanskirt?
The building and its parking lot nestle in a crescent of trees. The trees are fir mostly, although I can detect at least one Sitka spruce, a majestic fellow perhaps two hundred feet tall, spreading its tiers of boughs with weary precision. Protuding—no: gesturing!—from the front corners of the building, and at various angles to them, are plexuses of wooden and steel beams. Perhaps the beams exist to block curious customers from the private spaces in the rear of the roadhouse. Perhaps they are primarily decorative appendages. At any rate, these dense, dark, sheared or thronged traceries—horizontal totems, as it were—tug from both sides at the central facade, stretching it and extending it. If the edifice is radiant and joyful and contained in its weenie-spattered center, it is ragged and anxious and mysterious at its edges. Of the crisscrossed beams, some of the steel ones are embellished with slender serpentine scrolls of violet neon; some of the wooden ones terminate in carved figureheads; owls, maidens, hippopotami.
Although it was still raining, and although I was anxious to get to a toilet where I could pump the cooling ointment into my rectum, I nevertheless stood for a while before this curiously glorified hot dog stand and made the observations that I have just recorded. The Zillers stood with me. Eventually, I said to John Paul, “Hmmmm,” I said, “I thought you had given up sculpture."
He bared his sharpened teeth as if he were of a mind to bite me, and stalked inside.
I should like to record some initial impressions of the Zillers. Perhaps I shall limit the impressions to physical descriptions for it is too soon to note anything significantly deep concerning their characters. Only if I remain faithful to a reasonably scientific procedure of investigation can I hope to arrive at a lasting interpretation of reality. I keep reminding myself of that fact, but in the secret shadows of my heart I become increasingly unsure of my ability to apply scientific methods to this inquest. Certainly where Amanda is concerned, cold formality is out of the question. Moreover, if I am honest with myself, I might consider the possibility that the time has long since passed (if, indeed, it ever existed) when I was in possession of a genuinely rational disposition. However, I am not altogether sure that that is the case. I have had my moments. On the other hand, were I impeccably objective in my methods (assuming that my motives are above reproach), would I even be present at this ridiculous hot dog stand? And under these circumstances?
Obviously, I am raked by doubts. It is goddamned confusing. But I intend to preserve, so let me get on with it.
How would I describe the Zillers were I a journalist reporting for a popular periodical? How could I describe them to my parents, to my former colleagues at the institute? The adjective that comes most effortlessly to mind is . . . no, no, that isn't fair. Such terms are too strong for Amanda and too mild for John Paul. For that matter, most adjectives in my repertoire are too mild for John Paul. This cowboy-rococo hot dog stand, this work of art masquerading as a roadside zoo, is presided over by a man so exotic in dress and demeanor that even if one were favorably disposed to him one still could not help but regard him as a poseur, an actor, a walking artifice. And at this early stage of the game I cannot pretend to be favorably disposed. Oh, I don't dislike Ziller. Not yet. He holds a definite fascination for me. Quite aside from his Tarzanesque trappings, his grass-hut head of hair, his loincloth, his leathers and jewels, he conveys an intensity of being that is impossible to ignore; it blasts out of his disquietingly immobile eyes in licorice rays, and no doubt would blast just as mightily were he attired in banker's garb. He did not acquire his reputation as sculptor and musician dishonestly, one feels. There is a compelling conviction that the man is charged with that peculiar facility that can wring poetry out of the most elusive aspects of life, although it is questionable if he is capable of giving that poetry the ring of authenticity.
Let me admit it: he is too rich for my blood. Too supercool. He comes on like the nihilistic gunfighter hero in one of those awful Italian westerns; the invulnerable paladin who shoots down everyone in sight and rides out of town with a smirk or a yawn.
On those rare occasions when he breaks his haughty silence, his speech is so stilted one would swear he had written it out and memorized it in advance. He is at least six and a half feet tall and he seems to delight in deliberately towering over me as if he were some kind of god; jungle king, RKO Pictures, circa 1941. Of course, he
has
spent a lot of time in Africa. And Nearly Normal Jimmy vows that once when the Indo-Tibetan Circus was short of provisions, Ziller ran down a deer in the woods and slit its throat. And the following day he stood on the bank of a stream and snatched salmon out of the rapids with his bare hands. The day after that, the sound of his flute coaxed three pheasants into the cook pot. He backs up his unspoken boasts, damn him. What's more, he has just spent over a hundred dollars and a fair amount of time to get me, a stranger, out of jail. Maybe he wouldn't have done it had it not been for Amanda, but he did it. So, I'm going to give him every chance, I'm going to try to understand him—after all, he is one of the reasons I have taken my drastic steps of late—and I'm going to try to like him. But the truth is, friendship won't be easy with that self-styled Prince of Primitives. Not easy at all.
Amanda, oh that's quite another matter. She was instantly likable, instantly lovable, instantly seductive, instantly the mistress of my marrow, the speeder in my pulse. Even John Paul could not describe Amanda, that is one thing he could not do. Nearly Normal Jimmy once described her as a “religion-unto-herself,” and I readily admit that there is something beatific about her gentleness, her poise, her radiant face, the way she seems to float several inches above the ground. However, if she is a saint it was a pope of gypsies who canonized her. My God! What colors she wears. Bangles and bracelets and beads. Rings on each finger, on every toe. Her dark hair appears singed by campfires and she moves always as if to music; her manner mixes action and dream.
Like my own, her cheeks are chubby. Her features are more coarse than classical, but they are soaked with passion and grace. Her eyes shine as seeds in water do. Her mouth has triumphed over her front teeth, which are buckled like a derailed train. Far from distracting from her beauty, her crooked teeth cause her lips to protrude in a perpetual pout. Full and petulant, it is a mouth made for kissing and sucking; it pronounces her vowels as if they were fertility symbols, it sends men sliding helplessly over the arch of her Gene Tierney lisp.
It is futile to go on describing her. I am no poet nor am I clever enough to explain why her teacup breasts are as prurient as those of the most bovine enchantress. Obviously, she has bewitched me (just as Nearly Normal warned she would) and for the moment I hope only that I do not completely lose my head.
As for the Zillers as a couple, as for their manner of existence, a judgment now would not only be premature, it would reveal as much of me as of them. I could guess, of course, what the learned gentlemen at the Institute would say of them. Up to a point, I might concur. I am here no more to praise the Zillers than to bury them. I fear I have much to quarrel with them about. From what I know of their philosophy, it is gummy with romanticism, littered with mystic claptrap. Yet, if I did not believe them to be seminal figures, if I did not sense that today they practice a poetics that anticipates tomorrow's science, I scarcely would have set out with them toward . . . that which claims them for its own.
My hosts have bedded me down in their living room on an accordion of vivid cushions and quilts. Should they decide to hire me, Amanda said, there are two rooms out back above the garage that I could furnish as I wish. A far cry from my stately suite at the Institute, but I await entry to those chambers with the eagerness of a bridegroom.
The Zillers retired early to their sleeping quarters. Any lustful envy that I might have felt for John Paul has been blown out by the bleeding billows of my butt. Damn these hemorrhoids! They'll make me old before my time. As I lie here (on my stomach, of course), I detect laughter and music in their room. Candlelight is flickering—I can see it beneath their door—and heady incense is being burned. (Is their famous baboon in there?) They are playing phonograph records, some wild new jazz. Straining my ears just now I heard Amanda ask, “John Paul, is it true that Roland Kirk is the entire Count Basie orchestra in drag?"
That concludes a series of observations from the notebook of Marx Marvelous. The author may quote further from the Marvelous journal at a later date, or he may not. In any event, he cautions the reader not to take these entries too seriously. They were transcribed at a time when Marx Marvelous was a trifle confused concerning both his mission and his methods, when he was vacillating between a stuffy academic outlook and one that was frivolous.
Actually, such behavior was an old, old story for the guy. You see, Marx Marvelous was an exceptional young man, the kind who could easily have left his mark on the world. He had loads of brains, loads of talent, loads of class. But he was tainted by a whimsical ambivalence. Ambivalence hung about his neck like a half-plucked albatross. Ever since he was a whiz-kid eighth-grade physics pupil, Marx had dreamed of becoming a great theoretical scientist on the order of Werner Heisenberg or Einstein. Alas, dream as he did of golden achievement, he could not seem to take it seriously, neither the dreaming nor the doing. That is, he could take it seriously only up to a point, or he could take it seriously one week and the next week he could not.
Simultaneously, he entertained a second set of dreams, dreams the author hesitates to detail lest they shame the dreamer. These other dreams were purple hummers. When they poked their snouts into the dry laboratory of his normal consciousness, Marx would find himself snickering in the middle of Kepler's most exquisite equations and scratching his groin when he should have been scratching his noggin. These dreams stood on pianos and shook hands backwards with Errol Flynn and hot-wired the dreamer's thyroid and drove it to Tijuana with the top down; gassy, sassy, crazy, lazy spectacles that bounced on the belly of his more rational ambitions and desecrated his sober instincts. Such was his second set of dreams. And the conflict had never been resolved. Up to now, the life of Marx Marvelous had been a compromise. He had failed both as a genius and as a rogue.
Marvelous is still young and he has gone through many changes since arriving at the roadside zoo. There is hope for him yet. But his future is not really your interest or concern. Just make what you will of his early impressions of the Ziller phenomenon and let us march on to
