Geek Love (22 page)

We were up in Michigan when Alma started testifying. She was down to her nubs by then. Her legs were gone from the hip and her arms ended at the elbow. She looked better. Her front still flopped but she'd been eating Dr. P.'s Vegetarian Nutri-Prescription for months. Her skin had some tone and she'd dropped a few chins along with her limbs. More of her face was visible and her wispy hair seemed to have less expanse to drift away from. She was chipper, and she proved that “feeling good” about herself, as she called it, didn't make her any less irritating than being pathetic. There was a difference, though. Where she had been wetly repellent she was now obnoxious.

“I should say she might feel good about herself, the great lazy lump,” said Lil. “Lying up there being fed and waited on. When does my Chick get to play? A child his age needs frolic and silliness, not mooning about spooning green gruel into that blob and worrying over her every minute for fear she might feel a twinge of pain! All my other children had time to play even though they worked every day.”

I had nothing to do with Alma. To my recollection I never spoke to her directly after the first time in Arty's tent. But I watched her. To give them both credit, Alma was terrified of Doc P. and said nothing but yes'm and no'm whenever the good doc was around. And Alma worshiped Chick. But Chick was her painkiller so I figured her love for him had the same virtuous weight as an addict's for his drug.

Alma's testimony started in the Michigan factory towns. The redheads would wheel her out onto the stage beside the tank before Arty made his appearance. Almas twittering bat voice fed down through a button mike on her white robe and McGurk bled a little timbre in before he shot it out through the speakers.

“My name is Alma Witherspoon,” she'd begin, “and I just want to take one minute to tell you all about a wonderful thing that happened to me ... ”

The rodent squeak chittered in her chest and her stump arms waved in the white spotlight and the bright green tank gurgled, huge, beside her on the dark stage. The funny thing was that it worked. By the time Arty exploded in a rush of bubbles from the floor of the tank, the folks in the stands were ready for him, dry-mouthed and open. And those certain few in the bleachers, those stone-eyed kettles boiling with secret pain, received her message. Those who had been waiting finally found a place to go.

That's the way it began. It was Alma “Pen Pal” Witherspoon who actually founded what came to be known as “Arturism” or the “Arturan Cult.”

There were just a few converts at first, but Alma took over the process of organizing with a smug zest that made me want to kick her.

She was all humility and worship to Arty -- a kind of “Kiss the Ground on Which Your Blessed Brown Balls Drag” smarminess. But with the converts she reigned as a high priestess, prophet, and mega-bitch. She originated the concept of “Artier than Thou.” She ordered, organized, and patronized. The redheads, who had to wait on her and wheel her around in a replica of Arty's chair, hated her. Soon there were enough of the “Admitted” to give Alma a full-time staff. The redheads went thankfully back to balloon games, popcorn, and ticket sales.

Not that Arty was ever less than In Charge. Though he appeared only in his tank and did no trivial fraternizing, he knew everything. Most likely the whole thing in all its details was Arty's invention. He gave orders to Alma by intercom.

She sat in her commandeered trailer office chirping earnestly into the box on her desk and listening reverently to replies. Her method of passing orders on to the lesser members was as snooty as that of any conveyor from on high.

She set Arturism up like a traveling fat farm for nuns. Though she herself had lucked onto Arty while flat broke, all who came after paid what she called a “dowry.” Arty said, in private, that the scumbags were required to fork over everything they had in the world, and, if it wasn't enough, they could go home and get their ears pierced or their peckers circumcised and see what that did for them.

The thing grew. Arty's fans -- or the “Admitted,” as Alma insisted on calling them -- began to trail after the show in cars and vans and trailers of their own. From a half-dozen simple characters wandering the midway with white bandages where fingers or toes had been, there grew a ragtag horde camped next to the show everyplace we stopped. Within three years the caravan would string out for a hundred miles behind us when we moved.

Papa hired more guards and had the Binewski vans wired for security. After a month of phoning and looking and asking, Papa bought the biggest tent any of us had ever seen and set it up around Arty's stage-truck.

Dr. P. got a big new surgery truck with a self-contained generator. Two of the big trailers were converted to post-operative recovery wards. Chick was with Dr. Phyllis from early morning until supper every day. He was getting thinner and he fell asleep at the table leaning on Mama night after night.

“When does he play?” she would ask, her eyes blinking at the air directly in front of her.

Papa talked to Arty and Arty passed the word to Doc P. Dr. Phyllis didn't like it, but two hours each day, one after breakfast and another before supper, Chick was ordered to play where Mama could see him. She started reading fairy tales to him during the morning hour. In the afternoon he dutifully pushed toy cars around the floor of the family van, making motor noises, so Mama could hear him as she made supper.

Having established the chain of command, having petrified two dozen finger-and-toe novices into doing all the paperwork, Alma shed her left arm to the shoulder. She spent hours crooning to herself on her infirmary bed with the screen drawn around her for privacy. Her voice grew frail and she stopped testifying.

She was replaced immediately. Dozens clamored for a chance to testify at Arty's shows. There were thousands' waiting, willing to pay, for the right to see and listen.

I was walking by when Dr. P. walked out of her big new surgery truck and heaved the plastic bag containing Alma's last flabby upper arm into an ice chest for Horst to dispose of. She dusted her white gloves against each other and nodded to me. “Well, that's finished,” she announced through her mask. “It took a year and a half. I could have done the whole job in three hours.”

After a while, Alma wasn't around anymore. Arty laughed when I asked about her. “She's retired,” he said. “She's gone to the old Arturans' home to rest in peace.” I thought he meant she was dead.

Press

As their seventeenth birthday rolled past, the twins were fogged in by some musty hormonal mist. They were goofy, aloof, and up to something. Their bickering graduated from intermittent to constant, but the dignity that they felt appropriate to full-fledged bleeders dictated that the running argument be carried on in whispers.

The twins' piano teacher, whom Lil had hired by mail, was the greasy Jonathan Tomaini, with his one shiny-assed suit and two pairs of slightly mismatched socks. He took frequent opportunities to explain how temporary this “post” was for him and how thrillingly adventurous it was for a concert performer and graduate of fine New York music academies, such as himself, to doss down on a cot in a trailer shared with twelve sweaty, spitting, cursing, chortling roustabouts who viewed him as one rung lower than last night's beer farts. He gushed at how brilliantly gifted the twins were -- “a privilege to spend this brief hiatus in my career molding and influencing such talent.”

The twins claimed -- Elly loudly and Iphy with demure embarrassment -- that Tomaini never bathed, only washing his hands up to the wrist and his face and neck as far down as his collar. He was, they said, no fun to share a piano stool with. He had things to teach them, though, and they endured the piano stool for hours every day..

Mama was slipping away from us. Her pill intake was up and her body was changing. Large bones came close to the surface as her woman-softness withered. Her eyes were giving her trouble, the focus softening and shortening. Her walk had changed from a melodic flirt to a gaunt, uncertain lurching with her hands extended in front of her, touching. She rattled in endless detail about our various infancies. She forgot things. She left jobs half done and didn't notice when someone else finished them for her. She cried easily and occasionally without knowing she was doing it. She slept.

Papa had taken to antacid tablets for his stomach. He carried half-consumed rolls in every pocket and chewed them constantly. He dithered for eighteen hours out of every twenty-four trying to lash his small winter crew into dealing with the flush of business brought on by Arty's increasingly specialized popularity. The veins in his forehead threatened a stroke while he supervised the production of the expensive and classy “Ask Arturo” poster series. He was happy, though. The work rush let him forget that he wasn't the boss anymore.

New people kept cropping up and latching on. We were a road show and we lived with the ebb and trickle of faces who appeared, hired on, stayed for a few thousand miles and then, one day, were gone. We Binewskis kept to ourselves. Only the family stayed the same. Hanging out with the swallower's kids or making friends with the palm reader's daughter always ended in separation and forgetfulness. We were easy with strangers but never close.

Arty's growing flock, however, was different. I dreamed one night that Arty cried them into the world. They came out of his eyes as a green liquid that dripped to the ground making puddles. The puddles thickened and jelled into bodies that got up and hung around Arty.

But Dr. P. and the advance man and McGurk, and later Sanderson and the Bag Man and the nebbishes and simps who mooned and crooned around him, were all there because of Arty, no matter what other pretext they might claim. They all belonged to him.

The occasional television crews, doing thirty-second “Day at the Carnival” bits for the evening news, took a while to tumble to what was going on in the center tent. An hour after the first broadcast of a breathless on-the-spot reporter describing bandaged stumps in a wheelchair, the newspaper people started popping up.

After a few months reporters drove out to meet us on the road. Squads with cameras and notebooks and tape recorders waited for us on every new site as we tooled in and parked. A few towns canceled our licenses before we even arrived. The indignant slams just made Arty smile. “Those who want to know,” he shrugged, “will still get the message.”

It wasn't until one of the redheads brought a copy of Now to Arty's door one morning that we realized one of the loiterers in the journalistic pack was from that national news magazine. The guy in the lean tweeds had been puttering around the midway for weeks. The ticket peddlers all knew him because he'd flash his photo ID card and mutter, “Press,” trying to slip into the shows without paying. “Press your pants,” the redheads would say-a stock Binewski reply-and he'd laugh and pay up.

The Now story demonstrated his intentions clearly. The fur-chested Norval Sanderson, with his cynic's eye, bourbon voice, and discreet tailoring, was with us so he could expose the “ruthless egotism that was exploiting the nation's psychic undertow.”

“Arturism was founded,” wrote Sanderson, “on the greed and spite of a transcendental maggot named Arturo Binewski, who used his own genetic defects and the weakness of the unemployed and illiterate to create an insanely self-destructive following that fed his maniacal ego ... ”

Within days, Arty, the clever boy, had turned the attack to his own purposes by distributing ninety-second tapes to every network proclaiming that he was, indeed, the Transcendental Maggot, and that his power to thrive in the decaying frenzy of the planet was available to all those who were willing to accept it.

Norval Sanderson had covered wars, treaties, executions, and inaugurations for two decades. He was sharp and he lacked awe for anything, from earthquakes to heads of state. He was clever. He spent days lounging coolly in the corners of Arty's life, and he published three explosively controversial interviews with Arty in as many weeks. Arty liked him.

What now remains of Sanderson's old spiral-bound notebooks, his collection of news clippings, and the transcripts of his interviews with the people of Binewski's Fabulon is wrapped in black plastic and locked in the trunk in my closet. I take it all out when I want to think back. His fast, meticulous script is fading from black to grey, and the paper is brittle in my hands, but I can still hear his lazy drawl with its built-in needle.

From the notes of Norval Sanderson:

... Suspected earlier that Arturo was being manipulated by someone, probably the father, Al Binewski. I saw Arty as a tool for some functional “norm” who was raking in the cash from the dowries. Spent three hours with Arty today and completely revised my opinion. Arty is in complete,control of the cult, of the carnival, of his parents, and apparently of his sisters and brother -- though there may be some small spirit of resistance in the twins.

Arty is sporadically self-educated with wide lacunae in his information. National and international politics are outside his experience and reading. Municipal power relationships, however, are familiar tools to him. He has no real grasp of history -- seems to have picked up drifts from his reading -- but he is a gifted analyst of personality and motivation, and a complete manipulator. His knowledge of science is primitive. He relies on specialists in his staff to provide him with effective lighting, sound technology, etc. He is a skilled speaker on a one-to-one level as well as in the mass-rhetoric situation of his performances. He has a sharp awareness of personal problems in others ... professes no ethic or morality except avoidance of pain. Says his awareness is such that he feels the pain of others and is therefore required to alleviate it by offering the sanctuary ofArturism. Obvious horseshit.

His power seems to come from a combination of techniques and personality traits. He seems to have no sympathy for anyone, but total empathy. He is enormously self-centered, proud, vain, disdainful of all who lack the good fortune to be him. This is so evident and so oddly convincing (one finds oneself thinking/agreeing that, yes, Arty is a special person and can't be judged by normal criteria) that when he turns his interest on an individual (on me) the object (me) suddenly feels elevated to his level (as in -- yeah, me and Arty are too special and unique to be judged, etc.).

Just when you feel despicable, and that Arty's disdain is too great a burden to endure, he offers you the option of becoming his peer ...

June 14:

Ticket count 11,724 for this show. Bleachers packed to the top of the tent. Arty in tremendous form -- his voice booming through your very bones:

“I want you to be like I am! I want you to become what I am! I want you to enjoy the fearlessness that I have! The courage that I have! And the compassion that I have! The love that I have! The all-encompassing mercy that I am!”

The “yes” sighs up from the crowd like a night wind and I myself nearly weep at being surrounded by pain. I become convinced, for an hour, that Arty is not injuring them but is allowing them to acknowledge the pain in their lives in order to escape from it. A man who had to be a Certified Public Accountant on my left -- a big self-contained man in a decent suit and well-groomed beard. The wedding ring glinted on his fingers as his hands gripped his knees. He didn't shout when the others did. He was silent, focused on the tank and the venomous worm in it. During the “As I am” chorus he was frozen so rigidly that I glanced at his face. He was biting his lip and staring, unblinking, at the pale squirming thing down there in the green-lit water. He didn't move. But when I looked again, a trickle of blood was slipping down his chin into his beard and his lower lip was still caught in his teeth. There was a rollicking grandmother on my right, wailing and whomping throughout. Her easy tears didn't touch me at all. It was this thick-wallet with his gleaming, well-kept air who shook me up.

For hours afterward, wandering through the crowds in the midway, walking in the Admitted encampment, I am swept by the idea, almost believe that having all my limbs amputated will actually free me from the furious scourge of my days. The midway finally shut down at midnight and I recovered a little more sobriety as the lights clicked off. In the dark, at last, I went down the road a half mile to the Roamers Rest Tavern and contemplated my momentary conversion ruefully through the amber lens of Resa Innes's (proprietress) corrupt bourbon. I kept feeling a tremor in my shins and thighs and spine, from the voice of that ruinous tadpole. I kept feeling the heat of solid thighs packed against me in that sweltering hour on the bleachers.

I had another pull at Mother Resa's treacle comfort and remembered the Vesuvius coverage ten years ago. We'd goaded the pilot of the big press chopper into getting us the goods. As we bucketed crazily in the hot drafts around the crater and cleared the lip with a gut-chewing swoop, old Sid Lyman dropped his beloved camera and fell to his knees on the steel deck. Praying. “Good Old” Sid, who cracked abysmal puns while shooting mass graves in Texas, while clicking away at the mutilated children on Cyprus, and while filming six years' worth of intimate war footage -- jungle and desert. There was Sid, helpless as his precious equipment skittered out through the open door of the chopper. All Sid could do, aside from what obviously happened in his trousers, was gibber infant prayers as he stared out into that roaring pit of boiling stone.

What bothers me is my inability to recall whether I laughed at Sid. If I snickered then, over the crater, I've a hunch I'll pay for it. I asked the flatulent Resa for another tug at Aphrodite's bourbon teat and hoped, with absurd urgency, that I'd had the sense to bite my lip over Vesuvius.

This sheaf of news clippings was stapled into Norval's notebook:

NIGHT OF CRIME

AP: Santa Rosa, California

A sudden crime wave broke out in this coastal city last night, with looting of one large supermarket and three smaller grocery stores. All the thefts took place in the three hours between 1 A.M. and 4 A.M., and Police Chief Warren Cosenti reports that foodstuffs were the only items taken.

Spokane, Washington

Eight suspects were arrested inside McAffrey's Stop and Shop at 114 West Main by officers answering a burglar alarm from the convenience store at 2:30 A.M. The suspects, five males and three females, were apprehended while loading cardboard boxes with foodstuffs from the shelves. All eight were unarmed, dressed completely in white, and refused to make any statement to police. One man, evidently a spokesman for the group, handed police officers a note reading, “We have all taken vows of silence. Do what you will.”

Reports that several, or perhaps all, of the suspects are missing one or more fingers or toes have not yet been confirmed.

Spokane, Washington

County Coroner Jeff Johnson affirmed, in a press conference this morning, that all eight of the burglary suspects who committed suicide last Wednesday night in the city detention cells took cyanide.

None of the suicide victims has yet been identified, and neither police nor Johnson will comment on the rumors that all of the victims were missing digits from their hands or feet.

Velva, North Dakota:

Police responding to a burglar alarm at 3 A.M. Monday found the big plate-glass window of the Velva Coop Supermarket shattered and whole shelves emptied of goods in what appears to be ...

This headline was cut from the Hopkins, Minnesota,Clarion :

GROCERY WAREHOUSE RANSACKED

Police Suspect Carnival Link

On a handbill circulated among Arturans and carnival staff, Norval Sanderson had underlined this passage:

... To eliminate food shortages arising from the increased number of the Blessed, our Beloved Arturo has established a special kitchen truck and mess tent to serve three wholesome meals per day to each and every one of his followers. Novices who have not yet begun Shedding must obtain meal cards from their group leaders. Guests and visitors will be charged a nominal fee for meals ...

I laughed when I found this among Norval's notes. I remember the tizzy we were in when this handbill was written. I suppose we weren't far from Hopkins, Minnesota, because it was the Hopkins cops who were snooping around.

I was helping Lily pin up the hem on a new satin coat for Arty. We were in the kitchen of the van. Lily had her sewing machine on the table in the dining booth and Arty was sitting beside it on the table. I was chalking the hem and Lily had her mouth full of pins when the door jerked open and the twins stormed in with Chick.