Another Roadside Attraction (2 page)

For example, one muggy evening in Santa Barbara—just before a shattering electrical storm—Amanda suddenly broke contact with the “voices” who were speaking through her about the marital problems of a well-dressed female customer. After a minute of static and babble, she launched into what might properly be described as a philosophical discourse.

“The most important thing in life is style. That is, the style of one's existence—the characteristic mode of one's actions—is basically, ultimately what matters. For if man defines himself by doing, then style is doubly definitive because style describes the doing.”

Amanda expounded upon this at some length. “The point is this,” she said eventually. “
Happiness is a learned condition
. And since it is learned and self-generating, it does not depend upon external circumstances for its perpetuation. This throws a very ironic light on content. And underscores the primacy of style.”

After nearly an hour's monologue, she summed up by remarking, “It is content, or rather the consciousness of content, that fills the void. But the mere presence of content is not enough. It is style that gives content the capacity to absorb us, to move us; it is style that makes us care.”

Whereupon the customer, who had waited patiently throughout the speech, clouted Amanda on the head with her handbag and demanded her $4.98 back.

About thirteen months ago, John Paul Ziller married a pregnant gypsy, bought two garter snakes and a tsetse fly and, on the Seattle-Vancouver Freeway, opened a roadside zoo.

The garter snakes were quite ordinary specimens. The tsetse fly was not even alive. The “gypsy” turned out to be half Irish and half Puerto Rican and was not pregnant long: she suffered a miscarriage after falling in a hole one night while out in the brush with an army-surplus flashlight catching mice to feed the snakes.

Eventually, however, both the marriage—Ziller's second—and the business venture—his first—did, in a curious way, succeed. Even before the Corpse arrived, he had in wife and zoo a very definite roadside attraction.

As the reader must have guessed, the “gypsy” whom Mr. Ziller took to wife was Amanda, then twenty years of age and swelling with her second indiscretion. For those who savor the usually suspect “facts” of romantic love, an attempt will be made to render the details of the meeting, the courtship and the wedding. But first, in the interest of exposition—

A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

John Paul Ziller was born in the Congo. That was all. Born there. When he was one year old, his missionary parents returned to America and John Paul spent the rest of his childhood in a Lutheran parsonage in Olympia, Washington. But he was born in Africa. That made a difference.

When a Tarzan film would come to Olympia, John Paul would be at every screening—in the front row with his little friends, telling them loudly, “I was born in that jungle there. I used to swing on them vines.” No kid in his neighborhood could play Jungle Jim or Tim Tyler without hiring (for gum balls) John Paul as technical adviser. He could describe the poisons with which certain pygmies smeared their arrows, he knew that
simba
was the Swahili word for lion. The fact that he gathered that information from the library books which he devoured like cookies was of no consequence. He had been born in the jungle, he really had.

By high school, most of the children of Olympia had outgrown games of Tarzan. Ostensibly, John Paul had, too. Maybe he was not quite like the others, but he was no freak. He was the best drummer the school dance band had ever had, and he made good grades, especially in art (those masks he carved were terrific). Although he was well over six feet tall, he did not play basketball, and sometimes his obvious disdain for competitive sports elicited physical attacks from some jock who doubted John Paul's “patriotism.” His virility, however, was never questioned. After all, he had been the first male in his set to have the courage to visit Big Ruth's in Aberdeen (where he was said to have gotten all to which his five dollars entitled him) and he was the first boy to “go the limit” with Elizabeth Lee Franklin, thereby launching her long and dedicated career. Such feats insured his popularity with the boys, and with the girls? well, John Paul was lean and mysterious and sophisticated and “Golly, mom, he's better than any drummer I ever heard on the radio or
any
where.”

If one accepted his devotion to music and sculpture as normal, then John Paul's only peculiarity seemed to be a kind of exaggerated romanticism in which he sat as a deity in an aura. He was a dreamer who entertained exotic visions of himself, visions related to what he obviously regarded as his ties to another zone, perhaps to another time. When a chaperon caught him drinking beer at the junior prom, he asked, “John Paul, what makes you so darn wild? Is it because your dad's a preacher?” And John Paul got that funny smug look in his eyes and said, “It's in my blood, Mr. Yarber. When I was born, the drums of Kivu beat all night long, the hyenas ate my afterbirth.”

Soon after graduation, John Paul took his late father's insurance money (fortunately, the old parson had not taken his “God will provide” sermons so literally as to ignore the man from Fidelity Life) and was off to Paris “to study art.” The next that Olympia saw of him was three years later when he showed up with a fantastic mustache and a young baboon on a leash.

The Indo-Tibetan Circus & Giant Panda Gypsy Blues Band, being a somewhat unorthodox troupe, often aroused the ire of policemen, pastors and pursed-lipped ladies: those vigilant citizens who saw in the exotic trappings of traveling show folk a manifestation of some unnamed conspiracy to subvert their politico-moral prerogatives. Generally, however, as a result of the manager's buttery tongue, rustic diplomacy and thoughtful monetary “donations,” the show was allowed to go on (as they say), and by and large those community elders who reviewed the performance would agree that while some of it was weirdly incomprehensible, it had entertaining and even educational features and was unlikely to turn their children into Communists, desperadoes or fiends.

So, while the troupe frequently was sideswiped by the machinery of law and righteousness it deftly avoided a head-on collision—until one mid-August dawn in Sacramento. Some say the orders came from California's glamorous governor himself, although there was scant proof to genuinely involve the guv. No matter. The raid, at whoever's instigation, did occur. And after each member of the circus had been harassed, intimidated and thoroughly searched (the girls' vaginas were explored for hidden vials), eight of the troupers were hauled into jail on charges of possession of narcotics—although the substance found by police was not a narcotic but merely the mild euphoric marijuana, the law being somewhat remiss in making the proper pharmacological distinctions.

Those forty or so troupers not arrested—this group included Amanda and her baby son—moved to an isolated spot on the Sacramento River some miles out of town. There, they arranged their silver milk wagons, star-spangled VW microbuses, motorcycles and mystery-emblemmed '50 Dodge panel trucks in a circle, camping inside its circumference in the manner of early American pioneers. For two weeks, they feasted, danced, swam, fished, read, rested, practiced their acts and awaited the trial of their companions. When Justice came, she was not quite as predatory as some had feared. Two troupers had their cases dismissed for lack of evidence, four were released with fines and suspended sentences. The remaining two, however, were second offenders and they received prison terms of five years each. One of these had been a roustabout and the circus manager replaced him easily with one of the young unemployed cowboys who had taken to hanging around the Sacramento River campsite. For the other, unfortunately, a substitute could not so quickly be found. He was Palumbo the drummer (whose prior conviction had been for smuggling butterfly eggs in the hollow of his bass), and in order to drum with the Giant Panda one had not only to be versed in the blue-rock tradition but had to have musicological knowledge and polyrhythmic aptitudes so as to help weave those esoteric and eclectic textures in which the Giant Panda specialized.

Since there were several weeks of good bookings awaiting the circus in Oregon and Washington—dates that must be kept if the show was to finish the season in the black—the manager and the bandleader pulled the most roadworthy vehicle out of the encampment and sped down to San Francisco in search of a suitable drummer. Days passed. An occasional northbound traveler would stop by the encampment to deliver the message, “No chops yet.” On the tenth day, in the midst of a late communal breakfast of toasted puffball mushrooms (
Lycoperdon gemmatum
, Madame Lincoln Rose Goody would have called them), yogurt and fresh pine needle tea, the missing van squealed into camp, smiles hanging out of both windows.

“We got us a drummer.”

“God almighty yes, we do have us a drummer.”

“And do you know what drummer we got?”

“Ringo Starr?” asked a mouth full of puffball.

“We got John Paul Ziller,” the manager cheered. “He's gonna join us here in two or three days.”

Around the breakfast fire there rose a loud buzzing. Many troupers were excited, others clearly puzzled. Amanda, for example, was certain she'd heard of the new drummer but she could not readily identify him.

Well, by this time next week every man, woman and child in the civilized world may know the name Ziller and for whom it stands. But for the present it must be assumed Ziller is, to the general public, a nonentity. Therefore, the writer calls for additional.

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES I

Occupation __________. On the billions of varied (yet somehow identical) forms in whose linear receptacles (__________) Western man deposits the salient data of his being, upon whose tiny empty lots (__________) he erects the established facts of his identity; on those forms—tax statements, credit applications, mortgage papers, divorce papers, Social Security forms, insurance policies, Selective Service examinations, job applications, census surveys, police blotters, rental leases, passports, medical records, ad infinitum, near the tops of those forms not far from the open spaces provided for such cardinal intelligence as Name __________, Address __________, Sex __________ and Marital Status __________, there is an area of perhaps an inch in length and one-eighth of an inch in height for the confession of one's Occupation __________. Even John Paul Ziller, although more loosely rooted in the hardpan of traditional behavior than most men, was forced from time to time to fill in forms. And when Ziller would come to Occupation__________, he always wrote “magician.”

Now as the reader shall soon learn, whatever compensation Ziller earned (prior to the opening of the roadside zoo) came from his artistic endeavors: visual and/or musical. And while there is no little magic in the arts, particularly the way that Ziller practiced them, it must be assumed that in calling himself a magician John Paul was speaking figuratively and, face it, pretentiously. Yet, in reviewing Ziller's life—as some have been wont to do these past few days—one concludes that “magician” probably covers his activities as well as any other occupational description. After all, it is indicative of some kind of appropriateness when a CIA agent says of a fugitive as one said yesterday of Ziller, “We'll tear this country apart if necessary to get our hands on that fucking magician.”

II

Never prolific as a sculptor, it has been several years now since Ziller has exhibited at all. Yet few articles on avant-garde art are published that do not refer to his contribution. That the authors seldom are in agreement as to the nature of his contribution only supports the general notion of its significance.

The Non-vibrating Astrological Dodo Dome Spectacular was his masterpiece, about that there is no quarrel. When it was unveiled at the Whitney Museum of American Art it brought to its obscure young creator the art-world equivalent of the kind of instant notoriety a starlet achieves when she successfully pulls a film out from under the weight of a veteran and venerated actress. It was saluted as a tour de force and cursed as a scandal. Some critics were afraid to acknowledge it, others afraid not to. When a representative of the
New York Times
called at Ziller's studio for an interview, she was received by a near-naked, savage-looking man who stopped playing his clay flute only long enough to insist that the complex electrochemical sculpture in question actually had been executed by his pet baboon.

III

The prominent Janstelli Gallery presented Ziller's first one-man show of Cosmos Mystique Apparati. These were fiber glass pyramids and cones (volcano-like) about five feet tall. Some were covered with the skins of poisonous reptiles, others with the feathers of small gray birds. Others were painted in translucent whites and pinks, often with a bulb of weak light bulging in the bowels of the fiber glass like some frosty hemorrhoid or mathematical pun. Near the base of each piece was riveted a small brass plate which read: “Upon proper viewing, the external surface heat of this apparatus may reach 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. At that temperature, Old Master techniques are known to fail.”

IV

“The Janstelli Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of Ready Made Fossils, created by John Paul Ziller who has recently returned from travels in Africa (or was it India?).”

The artist had carved from ivory, alabaster and onyx replicas of important archaeological tidbits: the jawbone of Java man, skull fragments of Marmes man, telltale arm sockets from Tanganyika. Ziller chose to display these half concealed in mounds of sand or mud which he had dumped on the gallery floor. Upon two of the more striking pieces (embossed with gold), vats of fresh garbage had been poured. And the largest piece was buried beneath a pile of offal Ziller had gathered along the bridle paths of Central Park. Naturally, as the days wore on, the exhibition began to engage senses other than sight and touch, offering somewhat of a challenge to olfactory aesthetics.

V

At the same time that Ziller was itching the visual art world with his fossils, apparati, post-lunar illuminated Buddha turds and magnetic jade divining rods (helpful in locating the lost city of Mu), his reputation as a drummer was running like a vine along the invisible walls of the musical underground.