Another Roadside Attraction Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph / Quotation

  Part 1

  Part 2

  Part 3

  Part 4

  Part 5

  About the Author

  Other books by Tom Robbins

  Copyright Page

  This book is dedicated to the Kendrick boys—Capt. John (deceased) and Billy (kicking); to Shazam, to tiny Terrie, and to the “fantastic foolybear” wherever she may be.

  “And there are also many other things which Jesus did, the which, if they should be written every one, I suppose that even the world itself could not contain the books that should be written."

  JOHN 21:25

  “Incidentally, Reggie Fox, who runs the Dalai Lama's 16-mm. projector, said that 16-mm. Tarzan films or Marx Brothers films would make a big hit with the Dalai Lama and those around him. They most certainly don't want to see any pictures where human or animal life is taken; amusement and adventure are the things that they are interested in.”

  Lowell Thomas, Jr., Out of This World

  (Appendix, “What to Take When You Go to Tibet")

  Part I

  THE MAGICIAN'S UNDERWEAR has just been found in a cardboard suitcase floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami. However significant that discovery may be—and there is the possibility that it could alter the destiny of each and every one of us—it is not the incident with which to begin this report.

  In the suitcase with the mystic unmentionables were pages and fragments torn from a journal which John Paul Ziller had kept on one of his trips through Africa. Or was it India? The journal began thusly: “At midnight, the Arab boy brings me a bowl of white figs. His skin is very golden and I try it on for size. It doesn't keep out mosquitoes. Nor stars. The rodent of ecstasy sings by my bedside.” And it goes on: “In the morning there are signs of magic everywhere. Some archaeologists from the British Museum discover a curse. The natives are restless. A maiden in a nearby village has been carried off by a rhinoceros. Unpopular pygmies gnaw at the foot of the enigma.” That was the beginning of the journal. But not the beginning of this report.

  Neither the FBI nor the CIA will positively identify the contents of the suitcase as the property of John Paul Ziller. But their reluctance to specify is either a bureaucratic formality or a tactical deceit. Who else but Ziller, for God's sake, wore jockey shorts made from the skins of tree frogs?

  At any rate, let us not loiter in the arena of hot events. Despite the agents of crisis who dictate the drafting of this report, despite the spiraling zeitgeist that underscores its urgency, despite the worldwide moral structure that may hang in the balance, despite that, the writer of this document is no journalist, nor is he a scholar, and while he is quite aware of the potential historical importance of his words, still he is not likely to allow objectivity to nudge him off the pillar of his own perspective. And his perspective has as its central focus, the enormity of public events notwithstanding, the girl: the girl, Amanda.

  "There are three things that I like,” Amanda exclaimed upon awakening from her first long trance. “These are: the butterfly, the cactus and the Infinite Goof."

  Later, she amended the list to include mushrooms and motorcycles.

  While strolling through her cactus gardens one warmish June morning, Amanda came upon an old Navajo man painting pictures in the sand.

  “What is the function of the artist?” Amanda demanded of the talented trespasser.

  “The function of the artist,” the Navajo answered, “is to provide what life does not.”

  Amanda became pregnant during a fierce thunderstorm. “Was it the lightning or the lover?” she was sometimes heard to muse.

  When her son was born with electrical eyes, people no longer thought her foolish.

  Wearing a yellow velvet toga gathered at the waist with green scarabs, a garland of blue Japanese iris about her neck, her bubbling baby strapped to her back, Amanda would charge her motorcycle through the meadows searching for rare moths. One lingering afternoon in spring she chanced upon a small band of gypsies camped beneath a willow tree.

  Suspecting them to be skilled in such arts, Amanda asked, “Will you not reveal to me something of the nature of my true being?”

  “What will you do for us in return?” the gypsies asked.

  Amanda lowered her long lashes and smiled sweetly. “I will suck you off,” she said.

  It was agreed. After she had thoroughly pleased the four men and two girls, the gypsies told Amanda, “You are by nature a very curious woman,” and sent her on her way.

  For her birthday, Amanda's father (who was enormously fat) gave her a performing bear. The bear understood only Russian while Amanda spoke only English and Romani (although she was familiar with several of the North American Indian dialects, she never spoke them publicly). There could be no performance. What to do?

  Amanda made friends with the bear. She baked for him delicious meat loaves. She scratched his ears and fed him oranges, Oreo cream sandwiches and Dr. Pepper. Gradually, the bear began to do tricks on his own accord. He danced when Amanda played her concertina, he rode her silver bicycle, he balanced three croquet balls on his nose and smoked fine cigars.

  One day a man from the Moscow Circus visited the city near Amanda's town. At the request of her father, he came to see the bear. He barked commands at the bear in Russian but the bear paid no heed and eventually rolled over on his rug and went to sleep.

  “That damn bear never would take orders,” the circus man complained. “Frankly, that's why we sold him.”

  That summer, Amanda's big project was the establishment of a Butterfly Conservatory. Since many moths have a very short life-span, there was a big turnover among the inhabitants of her institution.

  Down by the waterfall, Amanda pitched her tent—it was made of willow sticks and the wool of black goats. Having filled the tent with her largest and softest paisley cushions, Amanda stripped down to her beads and panties and fell into a trance. “I shall determine how to prolong the lives of butterflies,” she had previously announced.

  However, an hour later when she awoke, she smiled mysteriously. “The life-span of the butterfly is precisely the right length,” she said.

  It was one of those mellow October days that seem concocted from a mixture of sage, polished brass and peach brandy. Amanda's father hiked (puffing) through fallen leaves, nut burrs and squirrel tracks all the way to Bow Wow Mountain. There he found his daughter in the mouth of a bat cave talking softly with the Idiot.

  The father was both relieved and perplexed. “You have a terrible cold, Amanda,” he scolded. “I thought you had gone into town to see Dr. Champion but someone said they'd seen your motorcycle zoom into the forest.”

  “I came to visit Ba Ba,” Amanda answered. “He has revealed to me the hidden meanings of my fever and the deeper significances of my sneezes.”

  “When one is ill it is much more logical to see a physician,” her father insisted.

  Amanda bestowed loving smiles upon her father and silently continued to embroider her dragon cloak.

  Blushing, the Idiot rose to his feet. He removed, with respect, his battered gray tam and stared down at his boots. “Logic only gives man what he needs,” he stammered. “Magic gives him what he wants.”

  One morning after a wild electrical storm, Amanda woke to find a strange inscription on the palm of her hand: a single “word” written in some obscure alphabet.

  All during her yoga exercises; during her garden-pagoda breakfast of poached salmon, strawberries and cream; during her astrological plottings down on the creek bank, she puzzled over it. She considered it as she and her baby rolled and gig
gled in the yard grass, she pondered it during her lunch of frog legs and coconut milk—even that afternoon as she circled the lake in her orange and purple sailboat, a choir of eight peyote buttons singing in her head, she probed its enigma—though, in truth, the inscription seemed less mysterious than funny to her then.

  The following day—the inscription would not wash off—she researched it in the Library of Anthropological Yearnings. To no avail. She sent photostats of it to young Jewish scholars who had loved her. She tried twelve times to decipher it during trance. Pleading letters she wrote to the Ministry of Esoteric Knowledge, Division of Archaic Titillations.

  She never did learn what it meant, although one night years later in an Armenian restaurant, a very old musician took one glance at it, handed Amanda a heavy iron key and ran down the fire escape.

  "And what do you believe in?” the parish priest asked Amanda sternly.

  Amanda looked up from the beetle shell upon which she was painting a miniature scene in watercolors. “I believe in birth, copulation and death,” she answered. “Although copulation embodies the other two, and death is only a form of borning. At any rate, I was born nineteen years ago. Someday I shall die. Today, I think I'll copulate.”

  And indeed she did.

  Birth, copulation and death. Fine. In truth, however, there were at least two other things in which Amanda strongly believed. Namely: magic and freedom.

  Only a belief in magic could explain the nature of her tattoos. And had she not been a very free woman she never would have consented, in the first place, to being tattooed in that manner and in that area of her anatomy.

  "Although there are more than one hundred and fifty thousand species of butterflies and moths in the world, only about twelve thousand are found in the United States. That is far too few."

  Down by the creek, Amanda was speaking gravely to an audience composed of Madame Lincoln Rose Goody, the librarian and naturalist; Smokestack Lightning, an aged Apache medicine man; Ba Ba, the toadstool visionary (townspeople called him the Idiot); her infant son; two dogs; her bear; a turtle; and Stanislaw, seventeen-year-old exiled prince of Poland and rock-and-roll singer who was currently Amanda's suitor.

  Having fed her friends a picnic lunch of acorn-flour biscuits, goat cheese, gooseberry preserves and iced mint tea, Amanda was seated in the lotus position atop a stump with the others on the turf at her feet. She was wearing a peasant blouse, lace knickers and Blackfoot beads, and, as earlier mentioned, was talking in a serious manner.

  “Unless they have been to Colombia, down near the emerald mines of Muzzo, no American has even seen the blue phantom,” Amanda complained.

  “That would be Morpho cypris,” Madame Goody chimed in cheerfully.

  “Yes,” nodded Amanda. “We have nothing on this continent to equal the metallic azure luminescence of that superb creature. And think of the death's-head hawk moth with its banded moon-gold body actually robbing honey from the hives of southern Europe; and think, too, my friends, of the gorgeous silky swallowtail brightening the treetops of New Guinea, and think—”

  “That's Acherontia atropos and Papilio codrus medon,” interrupted Madame Goody.

  Amanda gave the plump little librarian a long piercing look and was about to say, “Madame Goody, I do not give a rusty goddamn what these butterflies are called in Greek,” when she relaxed and smiled. She thought to herself, “So, the scholars are tedious, the experts never see the whole truth of things, still they have their role to play.” But although she said nothing, she made it clear to the others that it was the beauty and mystery of butterflies that interested her and not scientific nomenclature.

  “Did you know that Brooke's birdwing is so huge that in Sumatra it is often mistaken for a bird in flight? How grand it would be if in our own meadows we could be startled by the beat of its black-velvet and spinach-green wings.”

  “The Ornithopteria brookiana—er, that is, Brooke's birdwing,” said Madame Goody, “frequents paths that have been fouled by urine. Your baby"—she pointed to Amanda's son—"is already doing his best to make the birdwing feel at home here.”

  Amanda giggled. “I would also like to see the tropical castnid—”

  “The males of that species are very quarrelsome,” Madame Goody warned.

  “. . . living among my father's orchids,” said Amanda. “And in all our parks and gardens.”

  So, Amanda outlined her plan. Stainslaw's band, the Capitalist Pig, would soon be making a world tour. Amanda would contact foreign naturalists and collectors who, in midnight rendezvous in secret groves or rowdy waterfront bars, would supply Stanislaw and his fellow musicians with the eggs or larvae of many an exotic moth. The band members would hide these specimens inside their instruments: taped within the bells of guitars, concealed inside the hollows of drums, snug among the tubes of amplifiers. The ancient occupation of smuggling would be embraced in order to enrich the entomological resources of America.

  And so it came to pass. Alas, however, customs agents at Kennedy International Airport discovered and seized this noble contraband. The entire membership of the Capitalist Pig was imprisoned. And almost immediately a rumor swept the land that butterfly eggs would get you high. The woods and fields were overrun by unlikely-looking entomologists, and a sudden demand arose for nets, tweezers, magnifying glasses and the other trappings of zoology's most vast and gentle branch.

  "My dear Amanda,” intoned the family lawyer, “it has come to my attention that you are increasingly seen in the company of extremely weird individuals."

  Brushing a cigar ash from the attorney's somber necktie, Amanda corrected him. “There is no such thing as a weird human being. It's just that some people require more understanding than others.”

  “My dear Amanda,” ventured her father (he was enormously fat), “while I do not subscribe to the old saw that 'a woman's place is in the kitchen,' still I think it a salubrious thing when a young female undertakes to become expert in the culinary arts. However, it gives me little pleasure to learn that you have acquired a surprisingly wide reputation for the quality of your marijuana breads. In fact, I understand that you are sometimes called 'the Betty Crocker of the underground.' What am I to tell our relatives and friends?”

  “Let them eat cake,” said Amanda, gesturing benevolently.

  Amanda signed on as a clairvoyant with the Indo-Tibetan Circus and Giant Panda Gypsy Blues Band, then touring the Pacific seaboard. The fetus, at that time, was no bigger than a pocket watch but already it huffed against Amanda's bladder, and as the troupers motored up Highway 101 they stopped frequently at gas stations where their intentions most certainly were not to “fill 'er up."

  This did not annoy Amanda for it had long been her theory that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.

  Amanda read the future in tarot cards. She consulted the I Ching. She even practiced a spot of palmistry. Her principal duty with the traveling show, however, was to give consultations while in the wakeful sleep of self-induced trance. For the privilege of her psychic readings, customers paid a $4.98 fee.

  But mediumship—for Amanda, at least—was not as cut-and-dried and businesslike as the foregoing might imply. From the time of her puberty, she felt herself able to register the subtle and delicate vibrations of that area of collective consciousness we call the “spirit world.” As she grew older and more practiced, she found it easier to enter trance, and the trances themselves became more substantial and were of longer duration. In short, she assumed a certain amount of control. However, mediumship is never an exact science, and for Amanda it was a clear risk. There were occasions when the vibratory phenomena did not register, other occasions when they registered erratically—or got completely out of hand.

  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 femal
e 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.