His short, bald beauty of a buddy, Faust (aka Einstein) agreed to ride sidesaddle on stage, like in the old days, when talk show hosts had sidekicks, to provide wit and finesse if the script came apart, as it often did, making improvisation a must, but I grimaced at the thought. Faust had developed a tic as he aged that some compared to Tourette’s syndrome, but Tourette’s is an affliction, and Faust claimed that his incessant vulgarity was personal choice, a reaction to the times. Such language in Fargo, a town infantilized by church and state, could make for humiliation, disruption, chaos, and violence—maybe in that order, maybe not.
Even so, it was hope they sold. The two had lost a step from the stand-up glory days of long ago, when we compared them to Carson and Colbert, to Steve Allen and Richard Pryor, to Monty Python and the Marx Brothers, miscreants of a different order of insanity, but Frankenstein and Faust hadn’t lost their comic timing. That was their pitch. Entertainers were great like that after the country lost its chutzpah and embraced its status as a banana republic, refusing to nationalize the banks or hold to account the crooks who decided the entire economy and all of its treasures belonged to the privileged few. Pandemics, autocratic leadership, minority rule, racial and ethnic strife, sexism, indentured servitude, and climate change disasters like you wouldn’t believe. Women with minds of their own forced to have kids whether they wanted them or not. The troupers like Frankenstein and Faust did what they could to boost morale, working off the books for the good of us all, while the armed troopers and Militias, not to mention Marauders, busted heads and drank blood if that was the only nourishment at hand. Some in the Dakotas wore helmets with horns that made them look like the Vikings of old from the ancient Norwegian sagas. Ragnarok indeed: the Twilight of the Gods (also known as the despoilation of planet Earth).
In their glory days, they sometimes billed themselves as Frankenstein and Faust, sometimes as Frankincense and Einstein, depending on the time of year. The big Christmas fete that featured an a cappella boy band of aging boomers was a crowd favorite. Because nostalgia. It brought out the Einstein in Faust and the Frankincense in Frankenstein. When they laughed, the crowd laughed with them. If they cried, which they seldom did, they would cry for us all, a great, weeping hullabaloo.
Only Frankenstein’s personal friends knew his given name, and even most of them called him Frankie. When he wasn’t on the border, he resided in an intentional community near Tulsa, what we once called a commune, where he found, he claimed, off-scale contentment milking goats, shearing sheep—his belly getting beach-ball big, as though pregnant—and sitting on a rocking chair in his happy place.
The truth, as I recall, was not like that. Everybody lied. It was the new truth.
Faust spent time there too, when he wasn’t teaching local Fargo kids the new kinds of stuff they needed to know to survive in a failed state. Most Americans were no longer allowed to leave its borders. They carried too much disease. The rest of the world, except for the other failed states, was aghast at the recklessness, kinkiness, and complete irresponsibility of the millions of Americans whose prefrontal cortexes, the part of the brain that includes executive functions, including impulse control, had regressed. Many had the brains of irrepressible juvenile delinquents. They lived in a dystopia and called it exceptionalism. It was a national disease.
I call it Fantasyland. Heimlich, you might ask me, why? This story is the reason.
“They say go to Tulsa,” Faust said, back in Fargo and happy to be home. “Tulsa. Know what, friend? I’ve been to Tulsa. It’s a shithole.”
That wasn’t quite right. I too had joined that intentional community in hopes of finding peace and because, naively, I trusted Frankenstein and Faust not to lead me astray. There had been ninety of us living in the rugged foothills of eastern Oklahoma, what some call Green Country in those parts. All types, all kinds of creatures supposedly upholding the Ten Commandments but actually fornicating for the Lord, which they called the Eleventh Commandment. They named Frankenstein “Grandpa Frankincense,” something to do with Christmas bounty and his leadership style. I was known as “Little Heimlich from North Dakota.” I didn’t mind it much. Didn’t like it much, either. Faust often went by “Uncle Einstein” or “Brother Faust,” depending whether he was being straight-out smart or just smartass. His own forte is telling shaggy dog stories that never stop. The “Never Ending Book,” he calls it.
Sometimes I’d have to call out both of his names—”Faust! Einstein!”—to get his attention. “What say?” he’d answer. If he answered. “Who the fuck is that calling me way the fuck from Fargo? What are you doing here, Little Heimlich?”
I’m a nobody. He’s a somebody. I don’t mind.
When Frankenstein decided to leave the Oklahoma community for the southern border, an emergency mission of mercy in the company of his consort—a battle-ready woman with a good mind for business and handsome pecs strong enough to keep anybody in line—I took his place as in-house fixer for the commune. They told me to get stuff done while they fornicated and Bible-thumped, often with recording devices turned on.
Not much got done. The place was busting up. Too many despised each other when they weren’t fornicating. It was like the country that way. Each faction did what it could to humiliate the others. The Oklahoma Hill Country faction called me to a meeting once and made me wait for hours. Nobody showed up. No whips, no chains, no torture device. Nothing like that. Just abandonment.
Without Frankenstein to keep a tentative peace in place, self-appointed bigwigs in the community thumped their Bibles with a vengeance. Uncle Faust grabbed his bald head with both hands, screamed to the skies in frustration and disgust—“Fuck fuck shit piss goddamn!”—and quoted Mark Twain to the delusional ones with the regressive cortexes. “It ain’t those parts of the Bible that I can’t understand that bother me; it is the parts that I do understand.”
They screamed back at him “Abraham this” and “Isaac that,” gibberish about taking all of us from up north to the mountaintop to slice us open, sacrificial lambs in God’s name. “Abraham and Isaac?” Faust said. “A guy takes his kid to the mountaintop and plans to stab him to death? That’s a homicidal psychopath in anybody’s language.”
“You can say that again,” I said, and we packed our bags. North Dakota nice, we call it. Everybody in Fargo tells me Tulsa is paradise on Earth, with honest law enforcement, clean streets, and good work to be had—Woody Guthrie country. I don’t tell them otherwise, since I didn’t live in Tulsa itself, just in the hill country with a group of Bible-thumpers. All I want in the world is to do some good. So Tulsa is still on my pilgrimage map, still someplace to try when I need a change. When some yahoo tells me Tulsa is paradise, though, I wink and smile. “Is that the way it is?” I say. “If you go down that way, do it in a convoy. Dangerous days to travel alone. Don’t take any guff from the swine with their Bibles.” That’s good advice I gave them. Tulsa’s not the shithole Faust says it is—he’s prejudiced because Bibles and attempted murder in the name of Abraham give him a rash—but it’s no paradise, either, I can guarantee you that. No place on Earth is paradise. But then again, I’ve never been there. Not yet, anyway.
Nothing in America is a paradise, not anymore. It’s just a place to get up each morning and do something to stay alive. Unless you’re Frankenstein or Faust, who have a mission to instruct, improve, and entertain. “I’ll give you a good laugh,” they like to boast. And often they do. “Want a laugh?” It’s one of their catchphrases. Not much to laugh about these days. “Want a laugh? Come listen. Come see.”
Back in Fargo, punch-drunk after the commune, I rented a beat-up one-bedroom flat a short bus ride from the bombed-out civic center. I lived next to an alt girl whose actual God-given name, she claimed, was Cinderella. “Call me Cindy,” she said, smiling. We had a smoke now and then, but she came and went according to a clock in her head whose workings I never figured out. You’ll hear her story by and by.
It was autumn. The hawk of winter was on the move and would descend soon enough with a swoosh into the upper Midwest. But it was Indian summer, and that meant everybody was outside, mingling during the latest pandemic, many of them refusing to wear masks or keep their distance.
Faust and I settled into our routines while we waited for Frankenstein. While Faust went about his business, I sat and thought deep thoughts in a dark room to keep my mind, which is on the spectrum, from dissolving into a pudding of panic and waited for Frankenstein’s soon return.
We worked on logistics. It would be a kind of talk show, we decided. Like the old days, Faust said on Skype. Frankenstein, preparing to leave the border but still tending to children in cages, flickered in and out of view on the monitor like a wraith. He looked grizzled like a town drunk, but his bright eyes were sharp and clean. He gave a thumbs-up, the nails bright with rainbow-colored lacquer, one of his trademarks, but uncut and gritty from hard labor.
He disintegrated into static. A wraith, indeed.
“How’d he decide on that name?” I asked Faust.
“Frankenstein, you mean? He used to have a car that was made out of body parts, or body parts made from an automobile, or a broken body put together with duct tape. Or something like that. Am I making any sense?”
I let it go. It was too much for me. I went home and drew the curtains to collect myself. Darkness helps me think. The light can be good when I need stimulation, but too much light and my brain burns.
In Fargo I wore tattered jeans and a shirt with a hole wherever I went. I wore an unzipped winter fleece whenever the hawk of winter waved its wings just to let us know where we were at. The shirt had a caption on it: “Stay Positive but Don’t Test Positive.” I often wore a wool cap to hide my big ears.
It was a grand day, warm and brisk, when Frankenstein returned dressed in jungle camouflage gear like an Army Ranger. He even packed heat in a holster on one hip; the pistol made a dent in his jiggling belly. He was made of fiberglass or plastic and not flesh. He winked at both of us when we came up to give him a hug and help him with his duffel bags, but held out a hand to keep us back. “I might be contagious,” he said. “Give it a few days.” He smelled like the border—a mix of scat and cactus, of eucalyptus rot with an efflorescence of javelina piss baked into his skin. He had the shakes. He didn’t look too good. He’d have to fake it. If he could. I began to have my doubts.
They didn’t rehearse. They had faith in their long game. “We always go long, never short,” Faust liked to say. In his glory days, Frankenstein had interviewed everybody from Vice President Taylor Swift in the days before she became a politician—when she was a singer who starred in the musical remake of the movie Fargo, now officially classified as a national treasure—to Dan the Man, a stumpy, bald-headed cynic who loved to mock others. His own talk show, Bumper Cars, had gone bust when he developed his own affliction, not Tourette’s but something that resembled it—an epidemic on the Northern Plains for a time—and went haywire on the airwaves. As for Faust, he had played with a limping Tiger Woods before the crippled golfer’s assassination, and as a young man had drunk mescal with Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. “Nice guy when he’s in the right mood,” he liked to say. “He threw a mean curve when we played sandlot ball.” Then he hitched his star to Frankenstein, and the rest is history.
On the day of the show, the bus I took smelled like a urinal and perspiration and rotting potatoes. The clouds promised rain or snow. The temperature was dropping; I wore a dark fleece for comfort and camouflage. The big-bellied bus driver, chain-smoking through a soiled mask with a round hole in it for the cigarette, disregarded his “No Smoking” sign. He wore a green-and-yellow shirt that said “BISON” in big letters. The bus seats were slit. Filthy fibers of cotton stuffing clung to my shirt and filled the bus with a wet, soiled stink.
The streets were quiet until we got downtown. We rattled past a bank. I saw the glint of marble floors. Helmets on square heads, lots of automatic rifles. It wasn’t a bank, I realized, but a bar that had once been a bank. The bus ground to a halt, its brakes on their last legs, and stopped a block past the bar at the burnt-out hulk of a building that had once housed the local newspaper, now defunct. The driver, in no hurry, stared at a gang of punks dressed in red jackets with decals of fire-breathing dragons. “It’s a great day to be a dragon!” they shouted in unison. They were beating up an old codger with his own cane; he was so stooped that he tried inching away from them like a crab.
“Spring training,” one of the punks shouted toward the bus, as if challenging any of us to intervene. “This is it for the old coot!” Coot, I thought; I haven’t heard that word in a week of Sundays. I made a note of the word. The punks dragged the coot along, his body limp but twitching spasmodically. “You can’t do this to me!” he croaked. “Don’t you know who I am?” His mask had been torn asunder, and blood spittle streamed down his face. The leader of the pack, with a swastika carved into one lobe of his shaven head, faced the bus—none of them were masked, of course—and curled his arms to show tattooed skin and muscle. He held out a branding iron; I could see the swastika burning bright. It was the new symbol of what we were all about, another reason some of the world treated American borders like prison walls.
Near the civic center, the curbs were cluttered with fast-food rubbish and small fires burning in the chill as the forsaken homeless tried to keep themselves warm. A man about my age, his chin bouncing on his chest, rode an adult tricycle in circles, shouting, “What’s good for the goose is good for the baba ghanoush!” The civic center itself was a wreck. Piles of plaster, air that tasted of mold and mildew, beggars holding out their cups but cringing at any sudden move. The governor had approved legislation that authorized any legal to shoot any illegal or indigent for any reason at all, so long as it was videotaped for required broadcast on local news.
Inside the arena, the air was electric, pumped full of intravenous drugs, offered at the door. The drugs promised immunity and allowed masks to be removed. Contrary, I kept mine in place and sat on a metal chair, my phone in my hand so I could communicate with Faust, who would wear an earplug onstage. A stoop-shouldered man with snow-white hair tapped my shoulder. “Hey, buddy,” he said, “the guys with berets? They cops?” There were lots of them near kiosks that sold booze and drugs. They had on green berets and red armbands. A few carried rifles. Some were dressed like Vikings.
“No. They call themselves Militias,” I said. “Vigilantes, but sometimes they keep the peace.” Contemptuous, he pointed at people across the aisle on plyboard bleachers who wore costumes: men and women in hoop skirts, ex-vets in battle fatigues with big placards: “SUPPORT THE RIGHT TO ARM BEARS.” The vigilantes with the berets and the purple Viking helmet with horns looked none too pleased. “No, I mean them hooligans,” he said.
I smiled. This had to be one of Faust’s pranks. “Hey,” I said, “I’m on your side. Thumbs-up, buddy.”
“Fucking A,” he said, and popped me a crisp one on the shoulder that would hurt for two weeks. He told me his name. I told him mine and tightened up when he asked the inevitable question. “Heimlich? How that spelled? What it mean? You can save me if I start to choke?” I said anything that came to mind, secretly smug. Ninety-nine percent of the men in today’s America have a sperm count too low to make babies, especially if they’re unvaccinated; he was clearly one of them.
The production crew placed the guests on the sagging plywood stage. An end-of-the-world prophet. An impressionist in whiteface and rouge with a neon tattoo implanted in his chest: THOU SHALT, it read. A senile mystic with a turban covering his baldness—the whole world seemed to be going bald—and an oxygen tube in his mouth. It was the geriatric ward, the last of the boomers making a stand. Thank you, boomers, I wanted to shout.
But refrained.
The show started on schedule, but lights flickered and squeaking swamp fans stopped and started. Faust hurried on stage using crutches, one of those guys you admire because you know that before his arthritis turned his fingers into claws, he could play any instrument, including the tuba, but now he had the affliction of the body and the mind. He told us that special generators installed for the occasion provided absolute insurance against power failures.
“Hello, Fargo!” he shouted. He cupped a hand to one hear. “Let’s hear it, Fargo! One. Two. Three: WHAT’S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE IS GOOD FOR THE BABA GHANOUSH!”
