Another Roadside Attraction (39 page)

Therefore, Amanda is awaiting a letter. I am not. How could a letter reach us here? I've explained how the agents intercept our mail. Besides, would John Paul be such a ninny as to reveal his whereabouts to the Post Office? Ridiculous idea, a letter. All that is delivered to the roadhouse these days is rain. Air mail, special delivery, by the bagsful. How did so much rain get our address?

On Saturday morning, Salvadore Gladstone Tex banged at the door of the zoo. The cowboy may have had something valuable to sell, but nobody answered his knock. Later, Farmer Hansen came by, read our sign and departed. The sign said:
Closed Until Monday
. Since the Jeep was parked out front, Hansen probably wondered what was going on in here. He might have wondered if we were ill. Who could guess what Salvadore Gladstone Tex might have wondered. He galloped away on Jewish Mother, feeding his snot to the wind.

I remained alone in my quarters that Saturday, Amanda and John Paul spent the day in their respective sanctuaries, and Purcell, providing he abided by the rules, spent it in the kitchen where he had spread his bedroll close to the pantry door. This was the day when we were to put all our energies into thinking about the Corpse.

The weather was chilly and misty, so I neglected to open my window. Honestly, I didn't see how that could make any difference.

Approximately two thousand years ago, a pellet of wisdom dropped into the fetid, heavy, squirming, gasping, bloody, bug-eyed, breast-beating, anguished, wrathful, greasy and inflamed world of Jewish-Oriental culture as a pearl might drop into a pail of sweat. CUT!

His name was Yeshua ben Miriam, but history came to know him as Christ or Jesus. Sorry, sir, your face is familiar but just can't recall your name. CUT!

After a career as a maker of wooden farming implements, Yeshua (or Jesus) was moved to become an itinerant rabbi and kicked up a local fuss with his fanatical adherence to a philosophy of brotherly love. His strength of character was incomparable, yet he was not the least bit original in his thought. In fact, he had only one real insight during his life (and even that one was commonplace in India and Tibet). When he came to understand that the Kingdom of Heaven is
within
, he lit up like a Christmas tree and illuminated Western civilization for twenty centuries. They nailed him up but they couldn't unplug him. CUT!

On a Michigan funny farm there are three inmates, each of whom believes he is Jesus Christ. They are all correct, of course, but when they learned the secret—that everyone is divine if only he knows he is divine—they became confused and behaved in a manner that led them to the looney bin. Their culture hadn't prepared them for divine revelation. It hadn't even encouraged them to ask the only important question—"Who am I?"—let alone taught them to give the only logical reply. So when these three lower-middle-class working stiffs stumbled onto self-knowledge, they translated it into the absurd vision of the Sunday-school Superman, then wondered why they got locked up. Tough titty, boys. We prefer our God to be as singular as he is distant. CUT!

A prophet in the Jewish tradition, Jesus had little truck with Gentiles. ("I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Matthew 15:24.) On at least one occasion he referred to Gentiles as dogs. He saw his mission as helping to bring about the fulfillment of Jewish aspirations—and that mission ended in a grotesque fiasco. He differed from the mainstream of Jewish thinking only in that he believed in loving one's enemies. A radical difference, to be sure, but he would have been appalled by the suggestion of a Gentile religion being founded in his name. He never intended to sponsor a church, let alone an Inquisition. CUT!

JESUS:
Hey, Dad.

GOD:
Yes, son?

JESUS:
Western civilization followed me home this morning. Can I keep it?

GOD:
Certainly not, boy. And put it down this minute. You don't know where it's been.

CUT!

The clown is a creature of chaos. His appearance is an affront to our sense of dignity, his actions a mockery of our sense of order. The clown (freedom) is always being chased by the policeman (authority). Clowns are funny precisely because their shy hopes lead invariably to brief flings of (exhilarating?) disorder followed by crushing retaliation from the status quo. It delights us to watch a careless clown break taboos; it thrills us vicariously to watch him run wild and free; it reassures us to see him slapped down and order restored. After all, we can condone liberty only up to a point. Consider Jesus as a ragged, nonconforming clown—laughed at, persecuted and despised—playing out the dumb show of his crucifixion against the responsible pretensions of authority. CUT!

“Jesus, it's me, you know, the friendly with-it priest who puts your transcendental rap into the groovy idiom of the cool kids on the corner. Hey! Are you running with me, Jesus?”

“Boy, I'm running with you, passing with you and kicking with you. And you're still losing.” CUT!

For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that we might not perish but have everlasting . . . CUT!

Jesus, there is practically no historic evidence of your existence. Jesus, the Gospel is mostly Greek myth, literary embellishments and publicity releases. Jesus, we know so little about you. Jesus, is it your absence that makes our hearts grow fonder? Jesus, we don't have you, we have abstractions the Church has woven around your name. Jesus, you are a mystery. All mysteries, however mundane, have the stink of God about them. Jesus, is that your game? CUT!

When Jesus overturned the bankers' tables and kicked the capitalists out of the temple, he momentarily succumbed to the temptation to indulge in violent revolution in the cause of freedom. He did not persist in this behavior. Although he remained a rebel, Jesus was to support a revolution in consciousness rather than a violent overthrow of corrupt establishment. For his trouble, he was hung up on spikes. Would his fate have been different had he persisted in militant opposition? For his refusal to pursue political goals, Jesus lost popular support—and gained a legacy. CUT!

Over the strong red soil of Galilee he sailed like a boat. Picture him sailing past the feasts at which the men dance to melancholy music. Sailing through the olive orchards, through the vineyards where black grapes pout like moons. Sailing across the viaduct that spans Cheesemakers' Valley. Sailing up and down the slopes of ripening wheat. Sailing around the harp-shaped Lake of Galilee. Sailing through the heat, through the barking of dogs and the sawing of grasshoppers, through the herds of cud-chewing camels whose burdens bear scents of Eastern spices, through the crumbling villages where at dusk flitting bats frighten the women at the wells. And always, as he sailed, spouting his madness to his astonished disciples; his mad, extremist, unstructured, non-linear, poetic babble of forgiveness and love. CUT!

Think-tankwise, it was not a good day for me. I approached the image of Jesus from various and unlikely directions, as the director of East River Institute would have had me do, but I had trouble concentrating on any single aspect for more than a minute or two. I lost sight of my best ideas as one loses sight of a friend in a crowd, my mind roamed in unmentionable directions, and on a half-dozen occasions I must confess that I dozed off.

Toward nightfall—and without recalling that Amanda had advised me to do so—I raised a window, hoping that a spurt of fresh air would clear my cerebrum. I reclined on my bed and permitted the dank but feathery Skagit atmosphere to wash over me. Its shadowy body and its fir-odored volume of ancient vapors descended upon me and, with salty quivers, activated forgotten imprints into vivid experience.

Jesus was sitting on a rock in the desert, meditating and reading the Law, when Tarzan came riding up on a goat. Tarzan was munching nutmeg seeds and playing the harmonica. “Hi, Jesus,” he yelled.

Jesus jumped like he was stung by a scorpion. “You startled me,” he stammered. “I thought at first you were Pan.”

Tarzan chuckled. “I can understand why that put you uptight. When you were born, the cry went through the world, 'Great Pan is dead.' But as you can plainly see, I'm hairy all over like an ape. Pan was a shaggy beast from the waist down. Above his belly button he was a lot like you.”

A shudder vibrated Jesus' emaciated frame. “Like me?” he asked. “No, you must be mistaken. Say, what's that you're eating?”

“Nutmeg seeds,” said Tarzan, grinning. “Here, I'll lay some on you.”

“Oh, no thanks,” said Jesus. “I'm fasting.” Saliva welled up in his mouth. He pressed his lips together forcefully, but one solitary trickle broke over the flaky pink dam and dripped in an artless pattern into his beard. “Besides, nutmeg seeds: aren't they a narcotic?”

“Well, they'll make you high, if that's what you mean. Why else do you think I'm gumming them when I've got dates, doves and a crock of lamb stew in my saddle bag? If you ask me, you could
use
a little something to get you off.”

At the mention of lamb stew, Jesus had lost control of his lake of spittle. Now he wiped his chin with a dusty sleeve, embarrassment coloring his dark cheeks as the rosy-fingered dawn colors so many passages of Homer. “No, no,” he said emphatically. “John the Baptist turned me on with mandrake root once. It was a rewarding experience, but never again.” He shielded his eyes against the radiant memory of his visions. “Now, I'm what you might call
naturally
stoned.”

Tarzan, who had climbed off his goat, smiled and said, “Good for you.” He sat down beside Jesus and mouthed his harmonica. A jungle blues. “You gotta blow a C-vamp to get a G sound on one of these,” he said. He did it.

Obviously distracted, Jesus interrupted. “What did you mean when you said that Pan was a lot like me?”

“Only from the waist up,” corrected Tarzan. “Above the waist Pan was a highly spiritual dude. He sang and played sweeter than the larks; and his face was as full of joy as a sunny meadow in spring. There was a lot of love in that crazy rascal, just as there's a lot in you. Of course, he had horns, you know. And cloven hooves. Good golly, Miss Molly, how those woolly legs of his could dance! But he stunk, Pan did. In rutting season you could smell him a mile away. And he'd take on anything. He would've screwed this nanny goat if he couldn't find a nymph.” Tarzan laughed and ran the scale on his harmonica.

Jesus didn't appreciate the references to carnal knowledge. He made an attempt to get his mind back on the Law. But wherever his formidable intellect voyaged on the roiling sea of Hebrew instruction, it drew the image of Pan like a dory behind it. Finally, he shoved Moses aside and asked, “But you say he was a lot like me.”

“I said that, didn't I, man? I said he was like you, but different, too. Pan was the god of woodlands and pastures, the deity of flocks and shepherds. He was into a wilderness thing but he was also into a music thing. He was half man and half animal. Always laughing at his own shaggy tail. Pan represented the union between nature and culture, between flesh and spirit. Union, man. That's why we old-timers hated to see him go.”

The newsboys of paranoia hawked their guilty papers in Jesus' eyes. They were the same shrill urchins who would be hawking when Jesus would predict his disciples' betrayal and denial; when, in his next-to-last words, he would accuse God of forsaking him. “Are you blaming me?” he asked. His stare was as cold and nervous as a mousetrap.

By this time, Tarzan was pretty loaded. He didn't want any unpleasantness. “All I know is what I read in the papers,” he said. He waved his harmonica to and fro so that it twinkled in the sunlight. “Do you have a favorite tune?”

“I like anything with soul in it,” Jesus replied. “But not now. Tell me, Tarzan, what did my birth have to do with Pan's demise?”

“Jesus, old buddy, I'm not any Jewish intellectual and I can't engage you in no fancy theological arguments such as you're used to in the temples. But if you promise, Scout's honor, not to come on to me with a thick discussion, I'll tell you what I know.”

“You have my word,” said Jesus. He squinted in the agreed direction of Paradise, whereupon he noticed for the first time that an angel was hovering over them, executing lazy white loop-the-loops against the raw desert sky. “That angel will report everything it hears,” thought Jesus. “I'd better mind my P's and Q's.”

Tarzan spotted the angel, too, but paid it little attention. The last time he had eaten nutmeg seeds he had seen a whole dovecote of them. One had landed on his head and pissed down his back.

“In the old days,” Tarzan began, “folks were more concrete. I mean they didn't have much truck with abstractions and spiritualism. They knew that when a body decomposed, it made the crops grow. They could see with their own eyes that manure helped the plants along, too. And they didn't need Adelle Davis to figure out that eating plants helped them grow and sustained their own lives. So they picked up that there were connective links between blood and shit and vegetation. Between animal and vegetable and man. When they sacrificed an animal to the corn crop, it was a concession to the obvious relation between death and fertility. What could be less mystical? Sure, it was hoked up with ceremony, but a little show biz is good for anyone's morale. We were linked to vegetation. Nothing in the vegetable world succumbs. It simply drops away and then returns. Energy is never destroyed. We planted our dead the way we planted our seeds. After a period of rest, the energy of corpse or seed returned in one form or another. From death came more life. We loved the earth because of the joy and good times and peace of mind to be had in loving it. We didn't have to be 'saved' from it. We never plotted escapes to Heaven. We weren't afraid of death because we adhered to nature—and its cycles. In nature we observed that death is an inseparable part of life. It was only when some men—the original tribes of Judah—quit tilling the soil and became alienated from vegetation cycles that they lost faith in the material resurrection of the body. They planted their dead bull or their dead ewe and they didn't notice anything sprout from the grave: no new bull, no new sheep. So they became alarmed, forgot the lesson of vegetation, and in desperation developed the concept of
spiritual
rebirth.