Still Life with Woodpecker (10 page)

They were on the deck in the noonday sun, but Leigh-Cheri had raised the parasol, and Bernard crouched in the pencil-nub shadow of the mainsail gaff. The Pacific, tranquilized here by a broken-square jetty, rocked them as sweetly as winos rock wine. “You look familiar now, with your hair red. I think I’ve seen pictures of you.”

“I do have a good agent. My publicity photos get around.”

“Where? On post office walls? You’re some kind of infamous hoodlum, aren’t you?”

“I wouldn’t put it that way. When I was younger, I did have a slight brush with the law. You know how boys are.”

“No. Tell me about it.”

“Nothing much to tell. A misunderstanding involving a city councilman’s daughter and a borrowed car. But the aftermath … it did leave a mark. After thirty days in the sissies and snitches tank, which is another story, I was made a trustee. The trustee quarters were on the second floor, the same as the jail kitchen. All the trustees had access to the kitchen. Well, I’d been a trustee less than a week when three kitchen knives and a seventeen-inch in diameter meat-slicing blade turned up missing. Naturally, every trustee was suspected of stealing the knives. They completely tore apart our sleeping quarters, and the TV room, too. But they didn’t find the knives. So they lined us up in the hallway, watched over by a squad of guards armed with riot guns and Mace. One by one, we were marched into a small room, where, in front of several more guards and a captain with a flashlight, we were made to strip. They made me turn around, grab the cheeks of my ass and bend over, so they could look up my rectum to make sure I wasn’t hiding three kitchen knives and a seventeen-inch in diameter meat-slicing blade. Of course, they didn’t find the missing cutlery in any of us. But they did find four bars of soap, a
Playboy
centerfold, three ice
cubes, five feathers, Atlantis, the Greek delegate to Boys’ Nation, a cake with a file in it, a white Christmas, a blue Christmas, Pablo Picasso and his brother Elmer, one baloney sandwich with mustard, two Japanese infantrymen who didn’t realize that World War II was over, Prince Buster of Cleveland, a glass-bottom boat, Howard Hughes’s will, a set of false teeth, Amelia Earhart, the first four measures of ‘The Impossible Dream’ sung by the Black Mountain College choir, Howard Hughes’s will (another version), the widow of the Unknown Soldier, six passenger pigeons, middle-class morality, the Great American Novel, and a banana.”

“Jesus!” swore Leigh-Cheri. She didn’t know whether to laugh or jump overboard. “Look, who are you, anyway? And what’s your game?”

“Woodpecker’s the name, and outlawing’s the game. I’m wanted in fifty states and Mexico. It’s nice to feel wanted, and I’d like to be wanted by you. In fact, I just blew my disguise in the hopes that it would open your eyes and soften your heart. There. My cards are on the table. An expression your old daddy would surely understand.”

“Jesus! The Woodpecker. Bernard Wrangle. I should have guessed.”

His cocky smile was finally gone. If smiles had addresses, Bernard’s would have been General Delivery, the Moon. He looked at her with that kind of painted-on seriousness that comedians shift into when they get their chance to play Hamlet. Still, there was genuine tenderness and longing.

“This is too much for me to deal with right now,” said Leigh-Cheri. Despite the heat waves that hootchy-kootchied all around her, she trembled. Why had she come to the boat in the first place? She could have just sent the police. “I’m due back at the Care Fest.” Indeed, the panel discussion on birth control was scheduled to begin in seven minutes.

He attempted to help her onto the dock, but she
spurned his hand. Hustling away, the tattered parasol flapping like a werewolf’s shirttail, she called back, “They’re going to get you again, you know.”

Bernard’s smile came partway home. “They never got me, and they never will. The outlaw is someone who cannot be gotten. He can only be punished by other people’s attitudes. Just as your attitudes are punishing me now.”

WHEN THE ORGANIZERS
of the Geo-Therapy Care Fest announced their intentions, they were blizzarded by applications from manufacturers and salespeople of “ecologically sound” stuff who wished concessions to peddle their New Age wares—teas and herbs, sleeping bags and hot tubs, tipis and windmills, water distillers and air purifiers, wood stoves and frozen yogurt, arts and crafts, books and kits, bio-magnetic underwear and carob chip cookies—on the premises. The organizers refused. They had no complaint against ecology fairs or the cosmic profits to be reaped from them. It was just that their Care Fest was conceived to traffic, as they put it, “in ideas not objects.”

Now, the line that separates objects from ideas can be pretty twiggy, but let’s not unzip that pair of pants. Galileo was right to drop objects rather than ideas off of his tower, and the Care Fest might have been wise to stick with objects, as well.
Within the normal range of perception
, the behavior of objects can be measured and predicted. Ignoring the possibility that in the wrong hands almost any object, including this book you hold, can turn up as Exhibit A in a murder trial; ignoring, for the moment, the far more interesting possibility that every object might lead a secret life, it is still safe to say that objects, as
we understand them, are relatively stable, whereas ideas are definitely unstable, they not only
can
be misused, they invite misuse—and the better the idea the more volatile it is. That’s because only the better ideas turn into dogma, and it is this process whereby a fresh, stimulating, humanly helpful idea is changed into robot dogma that is deadly. In terms of hazardous vectors released, the transformation of ideas into dogma rivals the transformation of hydrogen into helium, uranium into lead, or innocence into corruption. And it is nearly as relentless.

The problem starts at the secondary level, not with the originator or developer of the idea but with the people who are attracted by it, who adopt it, who cling to it until their last nail breaks, and who invariably lack the overview, flexibility, imagination, and, most importantly, sense of humor, to maintain it in the spirit in which it was hatched. Ideas are made by masters, dogma by disciples, and the Buddha is always killed on the road.

There is a particularly unattractive and discouragingly common affliction called tunnel vision, which, for all the misery it causes, ought to top the job list at the World Health Organization. Tunnel vision is a disease in which perception is restricted by ignorance and distorted by vested interest. Tunnel vision is caused by an optic fungus that multiplies when the brain is less energetic than the ego. It is complicated by exposure to politics. When a good idea is run through the filters and compressors of ordinary tunnel vision, it not only comes out reduced in scale and value but in its new dogmatic configuration produces effects the opposite of those for which it originally was intended.

That is how the loving ideas of Jesus Christ became the sinister clichés of Christianity. That is why virtually every revolution in history has failed: the oppressed, as soon as they seize power, turn into the oppressors, resorting to totalitarian tactics to “protect the revolution.” That is why minorities seeking the abolition of prejudice become intolerant, minorities seeking peace become militant, minorities
seeking equality become self-righteous, and minorities seeking liberation become hostile (a tight asshole being the first symptom of self-repression).

The foregoing sermonette was brought to you by the Essential Insanities Dept. at Outlaw College. It was delivered in the hope that it might explain how the Care Fest, with so many masters on the roster, so many juicy ideas on the grill, went haywire.

At the Wednesday morning session, Dr. John Lilly had no sooner completed his lecture on sea mammal intelligence, ending with the idea that “a continuing dialogue with cetaceans could transform our view of all living species and the planet we share,” than he was challenged by a segment of the audience that considered it a waste of time and money to try to communicate with animals when we couldn’t communicate with each other. “What about human communication?” they demanded. “My ex-husband,” said one, “couldn’t understand a word I said. Do you think he could understand a porpoise?” “Is any big fish,” asked another, “gonna get my people outta the ghetto and onto the payroll? If not, I ain’t wasting my breath on the sucka.”

Tunnel vision.

Leigh-Cheri thought the questions made some sense, although the questioners were rude. She felt embarrassed for Dr. Lilly and was cheered when he handled the antagonists with grace. Actually, the morning session went as slick as dolphin sweat compared to the turmoil of the afternoon.

Because the Care Fest was running two days behind schedule, thanks to that birdbrained son-of-a-bitch Woodpecker, some doubling up was necessary. (If one must double up, then Hawaii, home of mahi mahi and loma loma, was the place to do it.) The panel on birth control had been combined with the panel on childcare. The platform beneath the banyan boughs was end-to-end with experts, facts and figures forming at their lips like froth. The discussion was scarcely underway before a prevailing
philosophy was established. It was this: if babies aren’t brought by storks, they
ought
to be, and maybe the storks could be trained to rear them, as well.

To be sure, this viewpoint was proffered by only a couple of panel members, but a large and loud contingent in the audience supported it with such volume and menace that it carried. “We don’t want birth control, we want prick control!” shouted a female in the third row. The applause that followed drowned out the woman who was lecturing on, yes, carrot seeds as an oral contraceptive. “Oh, dear,” thought Leigh-Cheri. “I wonder if that isn’t overstating the case?”

Things were getting a trifle rowdy. The sun didn’t help. Several people left for a dunk or a drink. Gulietta looked as if she wished to join them. Leigh-Cheri dangled from the stalk of her parasol, an easy target for bullets of brain Jello.

On stage, a magazine editor from New York, a chic executive of whom it had been said, “She has a mind like a steel trap—and a mouth, heart, and vagina to match,” was attempting a summation. She said, first of all, that childcare began with conception and claimed that it was egregiously unfair to expect women to babysit for nine months, night and day, without relief or assistance. In a voice that reminded Leigh-Cheri of a jackhammer at work on a string of pearls, the editor described to the conference the latest techniques for obstetrics, maintaining that women would not begin to realize their personal or societal potential until artificial insemination and controlled out-of-body gestation became routine practice around the globe. The editor hadn’t stopped at virgin birth. Once born, our babies must inherit the advantages of collective professionalism, she said, and urged the Care Fest to adopt a resolution petitioning the federal government to make funds immediately available for the subsidization of day-care centers where experts would insure standardized improvement for the young and independence for the parents.

The Princess was feeding this through her computer to determine how many shares she would buy when a poet, an aging humorist who’d been placed on the panel to provide a “different perspective,” did. He told the editor that her notions were a sift of sulfur on the roses of the race. The poet was snockered, but that has never been considered a handicap by those in his profession.

“What kind of babies will those be who are made of the formula instead of the fuck?” asked the poet. “No doubt they’ll possess two eyes each, and the recommended number of toes, but can the heat of their will be hot enough, can their imagination have all of
its
fingers, can their souls be expected to fully connect to the unraveling spool of the natural universe and not to the gunk in the bottom of the test tube? Will the infant pulled at the timer’s bell from a plastic womb where it has been deprived of rhythm, mother-bond, and the jostlings of everyday life not have some small space between its eyes filled with synthetic fluid, not bear, if nowhere else, in the core of its heart, the android’s mark?”

The editor shared with the audience her long look of practiced exasperation. “Are you afraid,” she asked the writer, “that a child not conceived in the old way won’t understand your jokes?”

From the audience, someone yelled, “Can the mystical bullshit!” at the poet, who, too determined or too drunk to heed, went on to say, “And those children reared under the watch of the state, burped by automats, tickled by technicians, comforted by recorded messages from network psychologists—what kind of society do you think those children will produce upon their maturity? Do you imagine for one moment that humans indoctrinated from birth by the government will be other than tools of that government, will not reside in and preside over a totalitarian police nation exceeding in tyrannical control the harshest nightmares of …”

By then the booing and catcalling had become so loud
that the poet couldn’t be heard past the first few rows. He produced a gin bottle and spoke into
it
. Softly. The New York editor was smirking. Numerous accusations and at least one ripe papaya were lobbed at the podium. There followed an extended general exchange familiar to all who lived in the last quarter of the twentieth century. Women said the men had eaten the cherries out of the chocolates. Men said the women were peeing in the pool.

A teacher from the Delphian School in Sheridan, Oregon, got the mike for an instant. “It seems to me that in the midst of this bickering we are forgetting the children. When we neglect the children, we neglect the future, the future this conference is designed to serve.” He wore the mildly triumphant look of a man who has led a return to reason. Someone slapped him in the face with a bloody Kotex. “Existentialist!” the teacher cried.

“If you like babies so much,” a woman yelled, “have them yourself.”

“Right on, sister!” encouraged a young man in her vicinity. The man and woman firmly shook hands. The solution to the overpopulation problem might rest in such handshakes.