James Kunstler - World Made by Hand

This mummery went on at considerable length. A few of the “actors” were good mimics. The story was incoherent. I barely remembered the TV series anyway. That I even got sucked into trying to follow it, though, was a testament to their earnestness. Their antics elicited a lot of laughs, though I don’t think the dramatic events depicted were necessarily funny, since they mostly involved the characters abusing each other verbally, when someone was not getting shot or beaten up.

When the long piece concluded and the actors had taken their curtain calls, Wayne came back out. An insect changing of the guard had occurred with nightfall: deerflies hack to headquarters, mosquitoes out in ravening swarms. With my hands bound to the chair, I could only endure their bites. My shoulders were killing me, and I had to pee so badly I was sure I’d have to go in my pants sooner or later. Loren looked like he was suffering too.

“Next up, give a nice welcome to Casey Zito, Torry Zito, Jarrod Zito, the fabulous Zito brothers, doing one of your old favorites, “Creeping Death” by Metallica. Give ’em a big hand.”

Three teenage boys came out, bearing an obvious family resemblance, ranging from perhaps thirteen to eighteen. The oldest one wore a braided goatee and had the tribal tattoos over his eyes. He carried an acoustic guitar. The middle brother came out with what looked like a yard-square piece of aluminum roofing material, and the youngest had a big conga drum. They took an eternity setting up and tuning. The performance itself consisted of the middle brother making a thunderous racket by bending, warping, and banging the square of sheet metal while the youngest boy furiously slapped his drum. The guitar player thrashed his strings and struggled to be heard singing above the din his brothers made. I thought it would never end, and then I thought the audience would never stop clapping. The oldest boy said, “We’d sing another one, but we ain’t practiced.”

After they got off, a couple of men brought out a mattress and laid it in the middle of the stage. Then they brought out a sofa and put it behind the mattress. Wayne came back out, exhaling an impressive cloud of smoke in the footlights.

“Okay, okay, hush up, now,” he said. “This next act, the last time we tried it, the man upstairs sent us a young one, and you know we need a little help that way lately, so give a big hand to Skooch and Melinda doing this scene from that old triple-X favorite, Teacher’s Pet.”

A nubile woman perhaps in her twenties came out and sat on the sofa. She was wearing a white blouse and a short plaid skirt with knee socks.

“I’m a schoolgirl,” she said and giggled. Then she opened a big book, like an atlas, and pretended to study.

“Ding-dong,” a voice cried offstage.

“Oh, gee, somebody’s at the door,” Melinda said. “I wonder who it is.”

She got off the sofa and went to the side of the stage, right in front of me, actually.

“Why, Mr. Skooch. What are you doing here?”

Skooch entered, a powerful young man with his long black hair tied up in a ponytail, wing tattoos over his eyebrows in the Karptown style, and braided beard too. He was costumed in a shiny old suit jacket and a necktie, but no shirt.

“Why, hello, Melinda,” he said. “The principal, Mr. Dingus, has a new policy of sending us teachers out on house calls to our favorite students, and you’re my special pet.”

“Really? What a coincidence, Mr. Skooch, because you’re my favorite teacher,” Melinda said. “But it seems you forgot your shirt.”

“No, this is our new official summer school attire.”

“Gosh,” Melinda said, “maybe I should get more comfortable too.”

This launched the old scenario familiar to those of us who had lived through the age when recorded pornography was a bigger business than Hollywood proper. Except it was a live stage show, being played out about ten feet from my chair, not an image on a laptop computer or a hotel TV screen. Soon the two performers crossed the line beyond playacting into the realm of raw animal instinct. I watched the audience as they watched the show with uniformly rapt attention, including the five or six children present. Loren followed the action with an unreadable blank expression, though his face looked unnaturally flushed. As the tension mounted on stage, the audience members took up the chant, “Go, go, go, go…” and when Skooch concluded his exertions, a wave of sustained applause swept the amphitheater. Then it was over, though the odors of procreation lingered on stage in the still, moist air. The performers seemed to rapidly recover their decorum. They declined a curtain call and bustled efficiently off stage.

The stagehands struck the set. Wayne came back on.

“That was great, Melinda and Skooch. Just like the real thing—” Shouts from the audience. “Yeah, I guess you’re right, Roy, that was the real thing. We sure hope that brings a little magic for you especially Melinda-that the man upstairs will smile on you and start baking a little bun in your oven. Thank you both. Now, onto tonight’s feature. We have a couple of visitors on board tonight. They came out here earlier to talk to me. I did my darndest to be nice. Gave ’em drinks. Grilled up some pullets. And I got to say, they were just rude. Sassy. Impolite. Served me with papers. Imagine that! It’s an old-time thing, for those of you too young to remember. A government agent serves you with papers andI don’t care which way you cut it-it comes down to this: they want to take away your property or they want to take away your freedom. No, don’t argue.”

Nobody was arguing, of course. Least of all me and Loren. Nobody in the seats made a peep.

“That’s how it is,” Wayne said. “Always has been, always will be. Anyway, these two come up from town. This one on my left here, he says he’s the new mayor down there in the Grove. That right?” Wayne stepped my way, to see if I was paying attention, I guess. “You hear me? I axed if that’s how you represent yourself?”

I didn’t answer.

“Whatever. I hope politics don’t ruin him. I forget his name. Fiddler Joe, I call him, because I seen him play once at a Harvest Ball up to Hebron or White Creek or some damn place. I forget. He’s good. Got-damn good fiddler. You could use coaching on the administration of justice end of things, though. You could study with me at five hundred dollars the hour. Have your secretary call my secretary and we’ll see what we can get going. Anyway, this other fella to my right. You going to tell me your name?”

Loren didn’t speak either.

“All right. Well, I just call him Preacher Man. He’s a minister down at the main church there in town. He says he’s the constable now too. Can you imagine that? A man of God serving the very ones that want to deprive somebody of his property and his freedom. It just don’t add up. But I’m only a common man. What do I know? I’m common as dirt, ain’t l?” Wayne said and started circling around the stage toward Loren, for whom he now seemed to have a special animus, judging by his increasingly loud voice. “And if I’m common as dirt, you all out there must be dirt too, because, after all, I am your chief, I am your fearless leader, I’m of you and you’re of me. So we must all be… dirt,” Wayne said, spitting out that last word as his anger ratcheted higher. “What do you think, Preacher Man? Are we beneath you as the soil is beneath you?”

Loren remained silent.

“Well, I intend to show you what we’re made of tonight by giving you a lesson. It ain’t Sunday, so this won’t be a Sunday school lesson, exactly. Maybe it’s philosophy. There’s some biology involved, so put in a bid for science too. I really don’t know. Education was never my strong suit. Except for shop class. I gotdamned excelled at taking things apart-though I didn’t much care for putting them back together. Anyways, the aim here is to demonstrate what is in God’s realm and what’s in man’s, and maybe how they shouldn’t run together in one person ’cause you will only end up confusing people while coming to grief yourself. By the way, this lesson is free of charge. Before I’m done with you, I imagine you will be speaking to God in person. You might ax him how he came to put you in such a pickle.”