There was a brick tavern on the Baltimore waterfront called the Big B. B for Baltimore. Maybe B for brick. It should of been D for Dizzy Dean. They worshiped Dizzy Dean in that tavern, even though he pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals and never played in Baltimore. The Big B tavern was a shrine to Dizzy Dean. The bartender had purchased Dean's old strikeouts and melted them down and made candles. The day Dizzy pitched and won both games of a doubleheader was encased in a corner of that tavern with fresh cornflowers at its head and feet and applause draped around it like bunting.
When he was a young man, my father spent a lot of time in the Big B. He drank Red Top ale and cracked the great delicious Chesapeake crabs or slurped the great delicious Chesapeake oysters—depending on the season—and talked with the Big B regulars about Dizzy Dean. It was a happy thing, although sometimes it got drunk and mournful and throbbed like Dizzy Dean's foot when he got it broken by a line drive to the mound.
Marriage to my mother ended my dad's Big B career just as that line drive to the mound ended Dizzy Dean's pitching career. My mother thought alcohol in any form was the sperm of Satan, and although I doubt if Dad ever truly shared her sentiments, he went along with them. Just hitched his water wagon to the shooting star of her faith.
You see, my mother was a stampede of fundamentalist religion. The Baptist faith was her shield and her sword. She outfitted herself in it and stormed into life, defying anyone or anything to oppose her. In her righteousness, she was invincible, and we never for a moment forgot it. When her nose wasn't in the Bible or her Sunday-school-lesson magazine, it was in the air in pious defiance. God was on her side, you bet. She spoke of her Master, Jesus, as if she and he were as cozy as bugs. And the way she talked about the Reverend Billy Graham, well it made me as ashamed for my father as if he were an actual cuckold.
For Mother, it was simple. You either believed the King James Version of the Bible, word for word, cover to cover, or you didn't. If you did, you were one of God's chosen ones and owned your fair share of stock in eternity. If you didn't, you were “lost.” My dad didn't want to be lost, any more than anybody else, so he went along with Mother's bag, often defending it in his own quiet way, but I had the sneaky notion that he would rather have spent an hour in the Big B with Dizzy Dean than an eternity in Paradise with Norman Vincent Peale.
As for me, I was spooked by the whole scene. Its omnipotence overwhelmed me and made me feel inadequate, guilty and uncomfortable. I didn't reject my Baptist training or, for that matter, even question it. But I longed for relief, wishing that just once I could open my box of Self out of range of God's blue eyes. The constant invasion of my privacy brought me down.
In the summer of my thirteenth year, shortly after I (with vague misgivings) had been baptized in the Potomac River, I learned that Einstein was an atheist. My mother herself had told me that Einstein was the smartest man in the world, and now, sitting in my tiny alcove room overlooking the evening streets of Baltimore, I read in a magazine that Einstein not only had not been “saved,” but he didn't even believe in God. My dad, home late from the hardware store, called me to supper. And called me again. But I sat looking out the window thinking bewildering new thoughts—while Baltimore frowned from brick to brick.
From that day on, each little intellectual step I took was a giant stride away from Christian dogma. Yet, stretch and pull as I might, I couldn't snap the emotional bonds. Intellectually, I soared high and free, but my emotions remained anchored in Baptist bedrock. Even today, I cannot claim that I have snipped the ties. In college, after a night of drinking and discussion, I would lie on my cot—head humid from the booze and voice box raw from the rough winds of debate—and wish that I had the simple faith of my parents to bolster me. Tonight, here at the zoo, I wish it still. Is that man's fate: to spend his closest hours to truth longing for a lie?
I caught myself staring first at the pantry, as if my confession had been a kind of prayer that the Man inside might act upon, and then at my three companions to see if my confession had spattered pitch on their bright mood. From my friends I received only the polite nods and smiles that had acknowledged the first two stories. From the pantry there was neither sign nor sound. I sat down.
Purcell ambled up and took my place. He chomped his stogy and began to drawl.
PLUCKY PURCELL'S STORY
I used to be enamored of a chick so mean that if she had been a kangaroo she would've sewn up her pouch. She had two husbands, one a Protestant chaplain with the boys in Vietnam and the other a cop who had accidentally sprayed himself with his own can of Mace and was in a V.A. hospital trying to get his 20/20 vision back. She collected checks from both of 'em and she had her door nailed shut from the inside and wouldn't open it for nobody. I had to crawl in through a small hole in the laundry room floor. Just behind the drier.
You may be wondering why someone of my background was attracted to a woman of such low character? And what she taught me about the power of positive thinking? Well, it was—
Knock! Knock! Knock!
There came a heavy and authoritative rapping at the front of the zoo.
Knock! Knock! Knock!
Again, a most violent and official knuckling. Plucky staggered back a few steps and nearly swallowed his cigar. I spilled wine all over my knees and froze in place. Even unflappable Amanda turned pale as a petal.
Only John Paul had his senses about him. Within seconds, he had moved from the rear of the kitchen into the dining-room-and-zoo-proper, sailing in long silent strides like a cat of the veldt, yanking his dagger from his loincloth as he moved. He sprang so quietly and quickly I honestly was unaware of his movement until I suddenly saw him crouched by the front door, blade in hand, ready to strike.
Plucky was the next to thaw. As three ominous knocks echoed once more through the roadhouse, he regained composure and ran to the pantry, where he checked the lock. When he was satisfied that the small room was secure, he stationed himself by its single entrance, poised like a guru of Oriental brawling, his muscular hands and feet prepared to hold off a platoon of commandos should one foolishly undertake to assault his position.
Next, Amanda came unfrozen. She rushed agilely about the kitchen blowing out candles. The roadhouse fell into blackness. Trembling, I stood and braced myself, for what I did not know.
The scent of peril was so thick in the zoo that it snatched Mon Cul from his sleep. However, the baboon contributed no foolishness. Instinctively wise in the ways of the hunted, he merely growled very low in his throat and readied himself for fight or flight without betraying his whereabouts. In the front room, we could hear the garter snakes stirring in their pen. Perhaps the fleas, too, sensed danger, but, of course, we had no way of gauging their reaction.
Baby Thor slept peacefully. In the dark, I could make out Amanda standing over him as a tigress stands over a threatened cub. Something cold had invaded the roadhouse, like a wave unbound by ocean. We entertained our separate fears and listened to the urgent roar of blood.
Knock! Knock! Knock!
On our psyches if not on the door, it left the imprint of the gestapo glove.
When at last Ziller flung the door open, my heart fell like one of those sets of false teeth that periodically are dropped off the Golden Gate Bridge. The figure silhouetted in the doorway was in uniform. Why did I find the attire of our visitor less than assuring? Hadn't I been taught that the policeman was my friend? At least there was only one of them, as far as I could tell. Would he go for his gun—or what?
“Special delivery for Ziller. Mr. and Mrs. Ziller.”
John Paul accepted the letter and returned to the kitchen far less hastily than he had left it. Amanda switched on the lights. To hell with candles.
“Aren't we a pretty pack of paranoiacs?” said Purcell. I didn't share his embarrassment. Considering what we had to hide, I didn't find our shyness a bit misplaced.
We heard the mailman drive away. Then, as Plucky and I finished off the wine straight from the bottle, J
ohn Paul used his dagger to slice the envelope. It bore a blue stamp with a picture of a hooded cobra on it and a postmark that read New Delhi, India. Due to the jitters of the moment, I neglected to obtain a copy of the letter or to successfully memorize its contents. However, if the reader will trust me, I am certain that I can accurately summarize the message.
The author of the letter was a young woman serving with the Peace Corps in India. She was writing on behalf of Nearly Normal Jimmy. Jimmy could not attend to the correspondence personally, as he was otherwise occupied. He sent his love.
Disappointment, it seems, had marred Nearly Normal's sojourn among the Tibetan refugees in New Delhi. He had failed to receive an audience with the Dalai Lama, who had taken to reading Time magazine and Reader's Digest and had publicly expressed doubts concerning his own divinity. The god-king drove around in a Nash Rambler and talked about a trip to Europe or America to learn more of the West. In the papers, he spoke of investing his followers' funds in Swiss securities. Among his aides at Tibet House, the conversation was not of tumo or Myanghdas or the coil of birth and death or the Thousand-spoked Wheel of the Good Word of Buddha, but of politics, economics and international diplomacy. It appeared that a whole new sphere of interest had opened up for the theocrats. “They've discovered the Mickey Mouse bardo,” Jimmy complained bitterly. “Contrary to the old saw, you cannot only take the lama out of Tibet, you can also take Tibet out of the lama.”
So, on October 2, a disillusioned and desperate Nearly Normal Jimmy did what no white man had done in two decades, and few ever. He crashed across the most forbidden frontier on Earth.
Jimmy, O Jimmy! Son of Arizona's most successful insurance salesman. Born with a silver policy in his mouth. Honor student, class president and voted “most likely.” Admitted to U. of Arizona at age sixteen on full scholarship. Precocious wizardling of finance. Wall Street gritting its paper teeth in anticipation of his onslaught. Weekend house guest of the Goldwater clan. Despite bulldog nose and acute myopia, Southwest debutante's delight. Jimmy. Who, on his palomino with expensive saddle, followed Amanda's motorcycle up the Bow Wow trail—and learned a different arithmetic. Jimmy, Jimmy.
The Peace Corps girl had watched him go. Crossing the prohibited mountains by the shine of midnight moon. Darting like a jack rabbit through the Himalayan ice, cowboy boots kicking up stones and churning snow, footsteps flying in cataract against the crusted banks of the river bed, glasses fogged, giggling madly, long red hair flapping in the thin air at the rooftop of the planet. Jimmy! Defying Communist machine-gunners and forty centuries of esoteria, arcane fancies dancing in his head, he sprinted furiously toward the fabled holy city of Lhasa . . . clutching under arm as if it were the jewel in the lotus, a rattling tin canister containing four reels of Tarzan's Triumph. Nearly Normal Jimmy. Barrel-assing toward Buddhahood. Om mani padme hum. Yippie!
We awoke the next morning to the sound of distant guns. Perhaps more than one of us imagined, as we toppled out of dreams, that the armies of the Vatican were advancing across the pea fields. For sure, I leaped to the window and searched the horizon for gaudy standards, for frenzied Latin temperaments, for canteen wagons crammed with pasta and peppercorns.
Of course, it was merely the opening of the duck season that had aroused us. Hunters' skiffs plied the river and the sloughs. Men and boys under red hats tramped the marsh-meadows and the low dikes that delineate the cattail-and-sedge-lined pockets of backwater. From my window, the red hats looked like polkadots that had escaped from a bandanna and run to the marshes in an effort to elude the bloodhounds. There was not a mallard in sight.
Unencumbered by breakfast, the four of us gathered in the pantry. Thor had been fed and left to play in the kitchen. The toy he selected that morning was a wooden duck. I suggest that we consider it a coincidence. Mon Cul had been assigned to guard duty outside the pantry door. As scouts and sentries, baboons are reputedly better than Indians, although a cowboy-and-baboon movie is too much for us to expect from television.
The Corpse lay on the butcher's table right where we had left it. It looked like something that had been dragged out of the storeroom in an Egyptian flophouse. Nevertheless, it had a presence. Nothing you could offer me, not even two weeks with Amanda in a honeymoon resort, could persuade me to say that it had an “aura.” Aura schmaura. But it had something. An intensity of being that went beyond psychological suggestion or wishful thinking. If the Christ in life had had, as the cliché goes, “leadership written all over his face,” then death had been a bum eraser.
John Paul Ziller sat at the head of the Corpse. Tall, thin, dark, gaunt and bushy. He wore low on his hips a sun-brilliant white loincloth, from the waistband of which protruded a dagger and a flute. His long neck was ringed by a collar of monkey fur, and teeth that some witch-dentist had plucked from a reptile.
At the feet of Our Lord, closest to the exit, sat Plucky Purcell. Husky, handsome, Aryan, forehead broad and manly beneath tight curly hair that was receding at a gallop. An occasional grin upset his fine features like linoleum yanked from under the feet of an emperor. He was dressed in logger's pants and a faded sweatshirt that bore the legend “Tijuana Jail.”
On the right hand of Jesus was Amanda. Fat-cheeked, pouty-mouthed, paganized, poised, vulnerable and regal, the full sweet funk of womanhood rising like steam from her open pores. Her green eyes shone like Renaissance icons. She wore a pound of jewelry, a peasant blouse, and a skirt of many colors in the lap of which she folded her hands as might a pious nun.
Yours truly sat at the left side of Christ. I had previously recommended that we approach the problem of him much as the problem might be approached in a think tank, and since no one else had a better plan, we concurred. As I was the only person here familiar with a think tank's operation, I was elected to officiate at the proceedings. Fair enough.
“To begin with,” I said, facing my three friends and the mummy from Rome, “to begin with, Plucky has assured me that we have a minimum of three days to attack our problem. Considering the nature of the problem, that is far from adequate time, but we must do with what we have. Ahem. Today, I thought we could engage in some elementary group discussion about the, eh, matter, while tomorrow each of us will remain alone to read and ponder and to think out a solution as best he can. The third day, we shall meet together here in the pantry again for deep and conclusive discussion. At the end of the third day—that will be Sunday night—we must come to a final decision as to what is to be done about the . . . Corpse.” (Note: from that time on we seldom referred to our guest other than as “the Corpse.") “Is everyone agreed?”
Ziller nodded inscrutably, Amanda nodded coyly and Purcell said, “That's okay by me, man. Let's get into it.”
“Well, then. I suppose the logical point of departure is to ask ourselves if our Corpse is really whom we suspect it is. Could such a thing be possible?”
“You know how I feel about it,” said Plucky. “Even if your radiocarbon dating report comes back that the dude died in 1918, I'll still believe he's who I believe he is and not the Unknown Soldier Goes Italian.”
Amanda giggled. “Why couldn't it be possible?” she asked.
“While I was in Mount Vernon yesterday, I picked up a copy of Jesus by Charles Guignebert at the public library. Let me read you this passage.”
“My goodness, Marx,” exclaimed Amanda.
“What?”
“I don't know. I mean you're just so efficient.”
Not knowing if she was complimenting me or putting me down, I opened the hefty book and commenced to read aloud: “'There are many serious contradictions in the Gospel accounts of the Resurrection. It is evident that the one statement that they have in common—the tomb in which Jesus was placed the night of his death was found empty the next morning—has been amplified by various (after the fact) details intended to explain how it took place, and which, because they vary so greatly in the different accounts, are all suspect. Suspect at the least of not corresponding to an
y memory and of arising from apologetic considerations.'
“Let me read another short passage: 'Much ingenuity has been wasted in an attempt to establish the probability of the removal of the body either by the Jews who had commanded the crucifixion; or by Joseph of Arimathaea, the rich believer who, having provisionally deposited the body in the tomb near Calvary, would come and remove it in order to give it a final burial elsewhere; or by some of the women; or by some disciple without the knowledge of the others. The eviction of the body by the owner of the tomb has also been suggested; or that Jesus was only apparently dead, and that, having fallen into a comatose state, he might have been awakened by the chill of the tomb, escaped, and taken refuge with the Essenes sect, or elsewhere, and survived forty days or more.'”
“I'll bet the women did it,” said Amanda. “I'll bet they took him out of the tomb and cared for him and gave him a decent burial in some little garden somewhere. That's what I would have done.”
For the moment, I ignored her.
“Professor Guignebert goes on to personally testify—in a more pessimistic vein—that the whole story of the empty tomb was a myth. He says, 'The truth is that we do not know, and the disciples knew no better than we, where the body of Jesus had been thrown after it had been removed from the cross, probably by the executioners. It is more likely to have been cast into the pit for the executed than laid in a new tomb.'”