The ones in the crowd who recognized the signature sentence went wild.
“Fucking A,” I said into my phone, set on loud volume, and saw him jerk at the sound but then laugh and stare out, searching for me and pointing an index finger my way as if it was the barrel of a gun.
Some in the crowd threw apple cores and even rotten eggs at him. The place was half full. All age groups. All status brackets. A suit here or there. Lots of team shirts and letter jackets. Some waved American flags. Some used sound makers that manufactured loud Bronx cheers.
Shots rang out.
One winged Faust in the foot. He screamed “Fuck!” then gave it up and motioned to the mystic with the turban and oxygen tube to warm up the crowd. A crew member came on stage with a first-aid kit.
Some of the berets and Vikings made their way into the audience and startled the complacent shooter, who apparently thought that anything goes. They approached him from behind, grabbed him by the shoulders, disarmed him, and dragged him to a fate that I didn’t want to imagine. Later, it wouldn’t surprise me if his mortuary pic showed up on the internet.
The mystic was a contortionist. He threw a tie-dyed sheet over his back and limped across the stage carpet, pretending to be Faust and gurgling incoherent omens into the mike.
“Boot out da bum!” somebody screamed. The mystic lost his temper, walked to the impressionist with the neon tattoo on his chest, and spit in his face. The impressionist waved, forgetting in his hipster senility how to move his arms, and accidentally slapped himself in the face, the gesture sufficiently comic to keep the angry patrons in their seats. Faust, his foot now bandaged by medics so practiced they could work the front lines of the latest brushfire war, brushed the gob of spit from the impressionist’s painted face. He wagged a finger at the mystic. “Fucking stop it! Where’s your decorum?” Then two goons in funny skirts waddled from backstage and dragged the mystic away, just in time for Frankenstein to make his entrance. “WHAT’S GOOD FOR THE GOOSE,” he shouted, “IS GOOD FOR THE BABA GHANOUSH!”
I couldn’t believe this was happening in Fargo, North Dakota, where courtesy was once king. Frankenstein himself didn’t look too good. His head twitched from the residue of a minor stroke that had occurred earlier in the week. He was also contagious, so he wore a double mask that covered part of his baba ghanoush beard. He tried to do one of his classic monologues but forgot what he was saying and hid behind his mask and beard as if it was a shrub. “These lights,” he muttered, nervously arranging notes.
“What the hell?” I said into my phone. This was not the Frankenstein I knew and loved. “Get him off the stage or bring him a glass of water,” I said to Faust, who didn’t appear to hear me in the hubbub. Or had he lost his earpiece in the fracas?
The place was filled with screaming human primates baying like hyenas; it reminded me of the tournaments where two or more fighters go at it until only one stands. Frankenstein knew what had happened to that rock star—what was his name, the one with the hair that never stopped?—who came to sing in Fargo but was literally torn to pieces when his voice froze up at the wrong time.
An egg splattered near the desk in the middle of Frankenstein’s monologue. The monologue wasn’t funny. I said so into my phone. Faust pointed at me and nodded to show he could hear. The egg wasn’t a joke, either, though the audience broke into guffaws. Better than a bullet in the foot. Faust cut the whole thing short, limping up to Frankenstein and pulling him to his seat behind his desk. It made me mad. Even the Boss would have problems with a crowd like this, if the Boss hadn’t developed Parkinson’s and could still sing.
“You fuckers!” Faust screamed in a frenzy. “Cut the crap right now! THIS IS BABA GHANOUSH TIME!”
I stood and screamed to let him know he had my support. “Hey, Faust, my man! I’m with you, man! Remember the Paradise Intentional Community!”
He startled at that and squinted into the audience. I made a fist and held my arm up high. He did the same. A portion of the audience joined us. It was a moment. I won’t forget it. It was the penultimate time I would see him alive.
The mystic had bombed. The impressionist was senile. Frankenstein introduced the prophet, an authentic muscle man. He wore faded Levi’s and a T-shirt without sleeves, so you couldn’t miss those ancient biceps as gnarled and strong as tree roots, like an old surfer with skin leathery enough to make into boots. He flexed his arms and featured the word on the tee. COURAGE, it said. Girls in nothing but G-strings came onto the stage and danced behind and around him, as if this was a performance by the late, great Pit Bull.
“Throw out da bum, I said!”
The two security guards on stage exchanged glances. They were unarmed and worried. One searched for the berets and the Viking helmets, who were still outside doing whatever they were doing to the guy who’d shot Faust’s Achilles tendon.
“I’m a goodwill ambassador,” Frankenstein had said, explaining why his security was unarmed. “Ambassadors don’t pack six-shooters.” I wondered what he had done with his pistol; he might need it. Enough is enough. We all know what happened to the rock star. How many national treasures can we afford to lose?
I hoped the prophet would be good, because the crowd was going ape. The prophet raised a hand for silence and cocked his head at a weird angle. He held out his chest. You could imagine him standing in a thunderstorm on a mountain in Tibet. He formed a temple with his fingers and bowed to the audience.
“Praying for peace?” Faust quipped.
“You want to know about the future?” he said, arms now flexed, the COURAGE on his tee almost glowing. “I’m afraid there’s nothing but a blob on the horizon.”
“Is it made of whipped cream?” Faust quipped again. “I heard some dairy cows were milked during an earthquake.” Nobody laughed. Frankenstein, recovering his aplomb, raised his eyebrows and cupped a trembling, misshapen hand over one ear. Everyone groaned predictably. He relaxed.
I didn’t. I had never seen him in such bad shape.
The prophet seemed oblivious to the ruckus. He pulled out a scarf from someplace and draped it over one shoulder, the kind of item you get from the local dollar store. “America must repay its psychic debts . . . debts . . . ,” he said. The echo amplified his powerful timbre. “Your karma is overloaded; you carry it all on your back, an albatross. I see a corpse dripping blood from its mouth. I see refugee families dying of thirst in the desert; I see pink mucus mutants crawling from your cellars, your attics, fastening to your throats like leeches. I see an infestation of rats. I see another virus become another plague. I see women forced to bear babies sold into slavery. It happens again and again. It never stops. It’s the Never-Ending Virus.” He had the audience under his thumb. He had once been a member of the ruling party before seeing the light and converting to Chrislam, the new, hot religion. “The strobe lights of tracers,” he said, “the napalm, the quick fix of a mushroom cloud. Seawater taking over the land. A virus in every pot of soup. Everyone a terrorist. A vast bloodletting. The Earth shedding its humans like vermin. Back to the source: the trees, the bugs, the vermin, the amoeba.”
The crowd started getting pissed at his deranged Debbie Downer schtick, and I could only hear part of what he said. It was social media and conspiracy theory brought to life. “Hijacked missiles, blowtorches, pocket computers wired to bombs, firestorms, children turned to cinders, pain, pain, pain. Pedophiles everywhere! In every pizza box! You’ll love it, lap at it like the dogs you are, do the dirty to your own kids, false pleasures, the Dark Age of the psyche. This country has no inward motion. All is lost!”
“Throw out da goddamn bum!” That crazed voice again. You could see Frankenstein turn pale at his desk. He rubbed his eyes. He frowned down at his notes. When he looked up again, his eyes grew wide like bowling balls.
A thing as much ape as man charged down the aisle. It had on a faded John Deere cap and overalls and waved a tiny red-white-and-blue flag. Under the overalls was a red-and-gold sweatshirt that featured an embossed ear of corn. “Lemme at him!” the ape screamed. “You traitor! Lemme at him!”
“Go get him, ya big Cobber!” the guy next to me shouted, ripping off his own shirt. There was a flag tattooed on his chest. Red. White. Blue.
“To hell with that,” a woman behind me shouted. She wore a faded Frankenstein tee from the old days. I swiveled to see her whale the guy with her heavy purse the size and shape of a watermelon. There must have been bricks in it. The guy dropped like a shot and lay still. She gave me a thumbs-up sign. “Go Faust!” she shouted. “Go Frankenstein!” She held out a hand to high-five me. I complied, my eyes on the purse.
The ape roared past us like freight. “Ya bum! It’s all over!” I couldn’t tell if it was half human, half ape, or what. A mutant of some kind. It had enough hair for the zoo. Jesus God Almighty, I thought, get Frankenstein and Faust to a safe place; even the border would be better than this. Good God in heaven, not them too. “Abort, abort!” I cried into my phone. “Abort!”
The berets and Viking helmets were back. They pulled out nightsticks and charged into the bleacher crowd. A few in the crowd with more brawn than brain splintered plyboard seats for weapons. I heard gunshots. A beret went down. The others opened fire.
The ape gathered momentum.
Some kid with a pistol stepped into the aisle to face the creature approaching him and took aim. The gun went off. But the creature, even with a blossom of blood on a shoulder, didn’t stop. He trampled over the kid, stopping to stomp on his head, left him lying like a log in the aisle. On the edge of the stage a guard had aligned himself with the center aisle. He crouched in a three-point stance and braced himself. “Hup! Hup!” he screamed, muscles tight as a firing pin. I remembered that he had once been a tackle on the local Bison football team.
“Da bum’s through!” the creature yelled. The guard leaped into its flailing fists. Their delirious screams were wonderful to hear for some, I could tell—a true catharsis, like the slow-motion metal-on-metal wrench of a car wreck. The crowd brawling near the stage stopped fighting for a moment to watch. Frankenstein was trying to hustle the prophet away. It was just like him, to think of others first, the compassionate pilgrim in Africa or on the border giving his all for the cause, but it was too late. The prophet, as if atoning for his Neanderthal opinions in the old language times, ripped off his T-shirt to expose his neon tattoo, which read “THOU SHALT NOT,” and gave the brawling crowd some sort of farewell blessing before his head exploded. Then someone hit the fuses.
If this is a stupid pet trick, I thought, remembering the long-ago heyday of David Letterman, it’s not working.
Imagine watching a program on the tube, sipping on a brew, maybe snuggling up to your Molly (may she rest in peace). Then you’re inside the tube, with some goon pointing a bazooka at your head. By the time I stumbled out of the civic center, where pandemonium was still raging, sirens and gunshots filled the air and there was a light dusting of snow on the streets. It was below the freezing point, approaching the doughnut hole, zero Fahrenheit; I zipped up my fleece and my teeth still chattered.
The burned-out hulk of a bus was smoking. I hit the pavement, flattened myself against a building whenever a car or group of punks cruised by. Behind me a helicopter took off. Maybe that was Frankenstein and Faust, getting out alive, I thought, though it turned out not to be so. The rotors faded away into the heavens, and I lost faith.
Nobody gets out alive. It’s time, I thought, to try Tulsa, to do some good there.
I stumbled over an unconscious man, blood all over his body, his face the color of caulk. It was the shooter from inside who had zinged Faust in the foot. The berets had done him over good. The body, dead I now realized, appeared to be turning white, but it was only the snow.
