Three
score and ten is man’s allotted span, or so the Bible says, but Dr. Lao always
said otherwise. The doc didn’t look a day older than the last time he’d passed
through Arizona seventy years ago in the depths of the Depression. Arizona,
however, had changed. Hardly a man was now alive who’d been around in ’35, the
last time Dr. Lao had passed through.
No one in Beeswax had the vaguest idea
who he was, is or would be. For all they knew, he was nothing more than he what
he appeared to be: an aged Chinese with an inscrutable expression and the eyes
of one who had seen too much and forgotten too little. They didn’t know the
half of it, or, for that matter, even a ten-raised-to-a-considerable-powerth of
it!
“Don’t know shit from Shinola,” the
elderly son of the long-forgotten State of Ch’u said to himself, recalling a
phrase that had caught his fancy the last time he’d passed through these parts.
“Don’t know either that shit and Shinola aren’t any different when all is said
and done, just as their asses and holes in the ground aren’t.”
Profundity was Dr. Lao’s
stock-in-trade, but there wasn’t much of a market for it in Beeswax, or
anywhere else for that matter. The traveling circus trade had seen its day, but
that day—a day like any other, but he was there—had gone down into night and
there’d been no use fighting it; there never is.
These days, the figures of myth with
whom he’d traveled were largely forgotten by the horde of benighted ignorant
among whom he moved. The idea of traveling in an ar-vee caravan—or, worse,
garishly painted converted school buses—with cartoonish “super-heroes”,
vampires and zombies—the contemporary archetypes—held no appeal. Best to go it
alone, like the old Jewish shoemaker with whom he’d teamed up for a while,
who’d been wandering for nearly as long as Dr. Lao, but whose incessant
bemoaning of his condition finally led the doc to part company with him after
telling him in no uncertain terms: “Listen, my flend, you no likee the way, you
tly walk some miles in other man’s moccasins, maybe then you get the big
picture.”
The circus was a thing of the past; Dr.
Lao had taken a new show on the road and Beeswax was as good a venue as any to
kick it off.
Holistic medicine, alternative healing,
herbal remedies, shamanistic ritual… that was Dr. Lao’s new gig. He smiled one
of his inscrutable smiles, remembering the snake-oil salesmen of yore. The
thing was, his deal was the real
deal. And kick-off time was tonight!
Right
on time, as if he’d summoned it out of the ether, the old jalopy with the
loudspeaker atop it (replaced at night by an illuminated pizza shop sign)
slowly made its way up the main drag of Old Beeswax.
“The medicinal miracles of the Orient,
the intuitive intelligence of indigenous peoples, the secrets of the shamans,
the mysteries of the mystics… All this and more will be unveiled for the
discerning, those who present themselves promptly at eight pee-em at the
Beeswax Palace, home to the fine arts of music, drama and dance, the site of
choice for special events such as the Seminar of Dr. Lao, a two hour
presentation that will inspire you to subscribe to the full week of workshops
to follow!
“Young and old, active or retired,
whatever your station in life, there is something there for you! Do not allow this opportunity to
pass, for we know not if it shall pass this way again. Limited seating is available,
ladies and gentlemen: first come, first served.
“The medicinal miracles of the Orient,
the intuitive intelligence…”
The rest of the message was lost to the
Doppler Effect as the heap made its noisy way up the hill.
Dr.
Lao, content, continued making his way along Main Street, observing the
reactions of the passers-by.
Beeswax had the usual number of
camera-toting retirees dressed in uniform-like clothing loose enough to
accommodate adult diapers, but these were not his public, although they bore a
strange resemblance to some of the traveling-circus attendees back in Abalone,
Arizona, when he’d had to explain to a carping schoolmarm who complained about
the presence of evil in his circus. What was it he’d told her? Oh yes: “The
world is my idea” adding that “I have my own set of weights and measures and my
own table for computing values. You are privileged to have yours,” although the
clarification was superfluous.
She didn’t get it; neither would any of
the geezers gathering for the ghost tour; few of any age did. But there were
those who thought they did. They would be out in force tonight, he hoped.
“What do you suppose that was all about?”
“Damned if I know, but it might be
worth a look-see,” replied Ralph Selkirk, recently retired from a long and dreary
career as a claims adjuster for a faceless insurance firm headquartered far
from the small and dreary Midwestern city in which Ralph and his wife Barbara
had led their unremarkable and relatively dreary lives until they pulled up
stakes and bought themselves a cookie-cutter condo in a complex on the
ever-expanding outskirts of Tucson, a tract of land that still drew the odd
errant Gila monster from the surrounding desert upon which humankind
relentlessly encroached.
They’d made the drive down to Beeswax
because they’d seen a brochure that convinced them the old mining town was
“quaint” and “picturesque,” populated by artistic eccentrics who sure looked
like aging hippies to the Selkirks, but as Barbara was fond of saying, there
was no need to be judgmental.
After a brief conversational
interchange that somehow seemed like a badminton volley between opponents with
neither skill nor agility, right then and there they discarded their original
plan of checking out the karaoke at the Bucket O’ Blood Saloon. Although
neither thought of them, the words of an old song seemed to hang in the air: “A
strange force drew me to the graveyard…” The Selkirks had spent their lives as
strangers to strange forces, but in a few scant hours, they were to become
acquainted.
“Say, you wouldn’t by any chance be
this Dr. Lao, would you?”
“What, you think all Chinee look alike,
hey?” Dr. Lao responded to his interlocutor. “Who you: King Willy the voodoo
priest in whiteface?”
“No, no! It’s just that… Well, uh,…”
Dr. Lao’s penetrating gaze had
thoroughly discomforted Andy Shapiro, who, truth told, at forty seven was a bit
old for the dreadlock-Rasta-do he sported. Why had he been met with such
hostility? He’d asked a civil question. It’s not like there were a lot of Chinese
in Beeswax, anyone could see that, but then again, one had to tread carefully
not to offend minorities, so…
“No tickee, no shirtee, eh? You like
stereotype people? Eh?”
“Are you from Canada?” Andy asked. The
old guy kept saying “eh”, which everyone knew was waaay Canadian, and Andy’d
read that Vancouver was crawling with Chinese these days.
“Canada! What: I look like Eskimo now?
Nanook of the North, maybe? Of course I’m Dr. Lao! Who else would I be?”
Andy had been planning to ask the old
guy a few questions about his seminar, but his plans had changed. Dr. Lao often
had that effect on folks.
“Ah, well… See, that’s what I thought.
I mean, well, you have a scholarly look, see, and…”
“Ah, you think I’m Dr. Fu-Manchu!”
interrupted Dr. Lao. “Mad scientist plotting the overthrow of the West! You
F.B.I. man undercover as New Age flake? Hmmm? State your business and be quick
about it!”
Thoroughly nonplussed, Andy was at a
loss.
“You know kung-fu?” Dr. Lao asked in a
voice pregnant with menace.
“No, sir! I have a health food store. I
just wanted to ask about… you know…”
“Ah, a health food store,” Dr. Lao said
cheerily, a toothy smile stretching across his somewhat wizened face. “Why
didn’t you say so from the outset, my good man! Perhaps collaboration is in
store! Who can say? Here, let me give you my card along with my fond hope that
you will be good enough to attend my seminar this evening!”
The sudden shift to urbanity with no
trace of an accent simply discombobulated Andy further, but he was able to
essay a nervous smile as he nodded his head vigorously.
“Sure. Thanks! I… Uh, well, yeah, of
course I’ll be there. Collaboration. Yeah, sounds cool.”
As Dr. Lao handed over the card, he
took Andy by the wrist in a surprisingly firm grip.
“Between us, I tip you off to a little
seeklet,” he whispered, shifting back into his Charlie Chan persona. “One of my
colleagues, he know kung-fu! Hey! He
plactically invent kung-fu! You keep
that under your hat, if you can fit a hat over all that hair, hee hee hee!”
Dr. Lao elbowed Andy in the ribs and
winked.
And just like that, he was gone.
Andy watched the old man sashay on up
Main Street and decided to make some calls. Tonight’s event was clearly not one
to be missed, and the word needed spreading.
The gang at Slug’s, Beeswax’s one
remaining low-rent bar catering to the country and western crowd was wondering
what the story was with the old Chink with the suds ‘stash, now on his third draft
brewski and clamoring for more popcorn. They’d heard the announcement—Christ,
you’d a hadda be deef not to!—and wondered just how in the hell this “Dr. Lao”
had gotten a permit for it without all the fuggin’ Old Beeswax artsy-fartsy
yuppies and hippies screamin’ bloody murder, but damned if the thing hadn’t
been goin’ back and forth, up and down and all round the town all guddam day!
Slug’s was an anomaly in Old Beeswax,
the trendy part of town. Nearly none of the patrons lived there—they lived out
to Calvin, the blue collar barrio on the way to Nabo, where the Mexes mostly
lived—, but Slug’s was a leftover from when the town really had been a mining
town, and the shitkickers weren’t about to give up their last toehold in what
had once been their town, so Slug’s
survived. Tourists knew better than to venture in, but that hadn’t deterred the
old Chink, who’d moved from the bar to a booth, where he was now holding court
for a trio from a construction crew.
“Jeez, Gramps, you don’t got to shout.
Christ, you’re as loud as that holler-wagon you got goin’ out there.”
“Glamps? Glamps! Are you talkin’
to me, flendo?”
Walt Sinkowitz, who had cultural
pretensions and was a cinema buff, had a double-feature flashback: Taxi Driver and No Country for Old Men. Just who was this Dr. Lao?
Walt should have asked who Dr. Lao is, but the peculiarities of grammar had
led him astray. No matter: he would learn soon enough.
Vinnie Costanza wasn’t quite sure how
to answer. Everyone was looking at him kinda funny and the place had gone as
silent as the tomb. Jack Gibbons, an off-duty state trooper was givin’ him the
fish-eye and frownin’ like Vinnie had just laid a no-muffler-low-rider fart.
“No offense, old timer. It’s just
that…”
“Just that what?” asked Dr. Lao, who for a second there… Vinnie blinked. Instead
of the old Chink, he coudda swore he was looking at a… a big ol’ mountain lion!
“Nnn… Never mind. Sorry. Want another
beer? On me.”
“Now
you talkin’, flendo! Tell you what: you buy, I buy. Pitchers for the house!
Pahty down! All you guys good guys! I invite all you guys come to Palace
tonight. You buy ticket, I plomise you not be solly.”
Revelry
reigned.
By the time Dr. Lao took his leave of
the gang at Slug’s, not a man-jack of ‘em would have dreamed of missing the
show. Whether or not they’d be sorry remained to be seen. But one thing was
certain: not a man-jack of ‘em could have dreamed of what was in store.
When Dr. Lao walked into Paco’s Tacos
down to Nabo, his colleague Buddy Kane was sitting amidst a bevy of plitty
señoritas at a large formica-topped table with baskets of blue corn tortilla
chips strategically placed. Buddy was doing his bit: there’d be a hell of a
turnout from Mextown tonight.
Things would never be quite the same in
Nabo after Dr. Lao and Buddy had gone with the wind that blew tumbleweeds down
its dusty lanes studded with single-wides and pre-fab houses whose once-bright
paint had been bleached by the blazing sun in the adamantine sky beneath which
Nabo lay somnolent for much of the year. But all that lay in a future that not
one among them could predict on that fateful afternoon, a future that…
“So Buddy, who are your new friends?” asked
Dr. Lao in barely accented Spanish.
One would have thought that after the
session at Slug’s, Dr. Lao would have been six sheets to the wind, but the good
doctor was as sober as Judge Roy Bean had been when he was a newborn babe back
in Kentucky. Dr. Lao would have cringed at any comparison with Bean, who had
once ruled that homicide was the killing of a human being, but that there was
no law against killing a Chinaman. Dr. Lao took great comfort in the fact that
Bean had been reincarnated as a deaf, dumb and blind Chinese who didn’t know
enough to get out of Nanking when the Japanese rolled in just two years after Dr.
Lao’s visit to Abalone.
Beer didn’t have any effect on Dr. Lao; nothing
did.
“This venerable gentleman is the
celebrated Dr. Lao?” asked a mestizo in ranchero duds, a middle-aged man with burnished
walnut skin, a man toasted by the sun beneath which he and his ancestors had
labored lo these many centuries.
“None other,” Buddy replied
laconically.
Buddy Kane was a soft-spoken and
taciturn individual, but by no means Dr. Lao’s “second banana”. He never failed
to attract attention, given that he had no eyelids, but very few ventured to
ask him how that came to be so. There was something about Buddy that
discouraged personal questions of that sort, although just what it was, no one could
say. Buddy was, well… strange. Sure
could play a mean flute, though.
Ana González, at the moment the
prettiest girl in Nabo, a seventeen year old girl with dreams of bright lights,
big city and wealthy blue-eyed young men vying for her hand in spite of a
likely future twirling her lithe body around a fire pole in a “gentlemen’s
club”, was—for some reason beyond her limited intellect to analyze—nearly
desperate to hear Buddy play the bamboo flute he carried slung over his
shoulder. No one remotely like Buddy had ever been a patron of Paco’s Tacos,
nor for that matter had graced Nabo with his presence. Who was this mysterious
man? And what was he doing traveling around with the old Chink?
“What kind of doctor are you? Buddy
didn’t say,” Ana asked in English.
“Ah! Plitty señorita a cluious kitten,
eh? You come to Palace tonight, all
your questions get answered, chop-chop. Tell all your flends Dr. Lao and Buddy
here”—indicating the quiet man with a grandiloquent hand gesture—“blinging
evlyone in Nabo, Beeswax and—what it called? Clappy place up the load? Ah!
Calvin, yeah, I lemembuh!—yeah, we bling all you peoples a night to lemembuh o’ maybe whole lot mo’, eh! Just lemembuh: no
tickee, no nuthin’!”
“That about sums it up,” Buddy chimed
in, nodding sagely.
“Count me in,” declared Ricardo Funes,
the roofer in the ranchero duds. The others at the table nodded in affirmation,
mimicking Buddy.
Dr. Lao smiled his inscrutable smile,
tight-lipped, eyes narrowed.
“Good move, Licahdo” concurred Dr. Lao.
Ricardo asked himself: “How did he know
my name?”
Dr. Lao winked. “Name that can be named
not a name,” proclaimed the wizened doctor of something. “What yo’ name befoh
you bohn, eh? What face you have?”
Abruptly, Dr. Lao began speaking English in an
exalted tone known to denizens of New York as “Manhattan Neutral
Express”, though he had never set foot in Manhattan nor would do so under any
circumstances. “Signs and wonders, señor, signs and wonders. That is our stock
in trade and be assured that said stock is strictly limited. You have the
questions: we have the answers.”
Another shift. “Lound up all yo’ flends and
bling ‘em along. Light, Buddy?”
Three slow nods.
Light.
****
At the appointed hour, a standing-room-only
crowd filled the Palace. Never before in Beeswax had an event attracted such a
diverse public: aged snowbirds, New Agers of every stripe, the Hispanic
community of Nabo, the blue-collar crew from Calvin, the owners of nearly every
small business in town, some military folks from the nearby base, teachers and
students, the lame and the halt, the old and the young…
The curtain parted and the previously unseen
was made manifest. All murmuring, coughing, shuffling ceased. Silence.
Dr. Lao stepped forward to the edge of
the proscenium.
“Ladies and gentlemen, imagine if you
will a small village with a small population. Imagine that there are modern
conveniences, but they go unused. Imagine yourselves living in a village with
vehicles and electronic gadgetry that go unused, a village in which everyone is
satisfied with the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the homes in which
they live and the way in which they live! Imagine being content to remain there
forever!”
Bug-eyed Buddy played a riff on his
bamboo flute.
Imagine!
“All you peoples dleamin’ about clazy
shit when the leel deal light in flont of you faces!” Dr. Lao stated
emphatically.
Buddy played a longer riff, a kind of
snake charmer thing, but no one present was cognizant of the similarity: what
resonated in their subconscious varied. For some, it was the Mamas and the
Papas singing “Dream a Little Dream of Me”, for others a Fleetwood Mac song
with Stevie Nicks asking “Have you any dreams you’ve dreamed yourself”, but for
Tad Waring, a fugitive from a stock fraud charge who knew it was time to cross
the border, what came to mind was a verse from the Thomas Pynchon novel V: “Cross yourself and face the wall/Dreams
will help you not at all”.
Not one of the Nabo contingent had read
Calderón de la Barca’s classic drama La
Vida es Sueño (“Life is but a dream, da-doom, da-da-da-da-doom”), but…
“Hey!” shouted Dr. Lao, snapping the
rubes out of their reveries. “Hey!”
The last notes of Buddy’s flute wafted
away into the rafters. He slung the flute and swung into a kata of incredible complexity: he knew kung-fu! He whirled and
twirled, arms and legs moving at a speed that made him, well… flow.
“Hey! Show time, circus time!” bellowed
Dr. Lao. “Let’s go we be goin’! Dleamtime, peoples! But lemembuh this: Dlop
self, dlop desire! No learning, no ploblems! Eh, Buddy?”
“All the suffering and joy we
experience depend upon conditions,” Buddy agreed.
Andy Shapiro began stroking his chin. What was
this? Kane? That was the Kung-Fu
character’s name, the teevee guy with the shaven head who played the flute. Was
this guy some sort of wise-ass? And this Dr. Lao? That stuff about the “small
village” rang a bell.
Ding-dong! Ding-dong! Ding-dong!
But it fell on deaf ears.
“Observe!” entreated Dr. Lao. “Observe
what you see and what you don’t see! What you see emerges from the unseen,
which you will see soon enough. We have come to the Beeswax Palace to reveal
the unseen. Attention! The things of this world come from something; something
comes from nothing. Eh, Buddy?”
Like Yeats’ Chinamen in the lapis
lazuli carving about which he waxed poetic—“their eyes, mid many wrinkles,
their eyes, their ancient glittering eyes…”—, Dr. Lao and Buddy beamed the silent,
pensive crowd with their eyes.
“When does the show start?” Barbara
Selkirk wanted to know, breaking her silence.
Ralph, who felt a tingling somewhere
near his abdomen, whispered to his wife: “I have a feeling it started a while
ago.”
“All appearances are illusions. Don’t
hold on to appearances,” Buddy concurred, executing another kata with blinding speed.
“What the fu…?” Vinnie Costenza
commented to Walt Sinkowitz. The Calvin crew on the whole were wondering just
what exactly they’d walked into, but Walt was wondering just exactly where they
were headed, not knowing exactly why he was hearing a knowing internal voice
insisting “There’s a new sheriff in town”.
Ana González was thinking that Kane was
pretty hot, never mind that he kept agreeing with the crazy old Chinese laundryman
who was the weirdest carny barker that had ever hit the streets of Beeswax:
this had the guy who promised to show the monster baby from Sowdattica, the
girl with the yellow elastic tissues and the morphadite all beat to shit. This
was one weird show!
“Hah! Lights out!”
Dr. Lao’s command echoed as the Beeswax
Palace plunged into darkness amidst the murmurings and consternation of the
crowd.
“Now we get down to business, Beeswax
folk, you betcha’!” resonated a voice from the darkness, deep in the unseen.
The plitty señoritas squirmed, waiting
for male hands to fall upon their thighs. They waited in vain, even Ana, seated
next to her current beau, Quique Morales, who was so creeped out that Ana’s
teacup-tilted tits and tight thighs were as far away as his cousins in Seattle.
Just what “business” was coming down? This was sick cheet, man!
Dr. Lao awaited silence. His wait was
brief.
“Oh yes, Beeswax peoples: be still,” he
urged when silence reigned. “Over the rainbow time now, you betcha’. You all
pay you money, now you get to dance to the piper.”
He made an unseen pass in the darkened
space and: Lo, an unfamiliar landscape took form with inexplicable depth upon
the stage, receding in a vanishing-point perspective that captivated the
already-stunned crowd of Beeswax peoples.
Buddy’s flute blew, blew a long and
tremulous note that entered in their ears, sank to the base of their spines and
began to climb their backbones like a snake with a purpose.
Dr. Lao smiled in the darkness, which
he owned, the landscape seen by Beeswax peoples being just one more illusion in
their illusory lives. Beeswax peoples have heads squarely up Beeswax peoples
asses, you betcha’! But not for much longer, oh no!
“Hah! Leddy to follow yellow blick
road, Beeswax peoples?” called the voice still hidden in darkness. “Hah! Leddy
to see what behind the cuhtain?”
The hypnotic tones of Buddy’s flute had
thoroughly pacified the crowd, each and every one, and Beeswax was headed for
X-Files territory without a single member of the audience aware that en masse, they were going to leave National Enquirer stories like “Bat Boy
of the Ozarks” deep in the dust. The freaky-deaky quality of Lost was kid stuff compared to what
would become to be known as the “Beeswax Vanishings”. The “Dharma Initiative”
of Dr. Lao and Buddy Kane was the real deal.
Seated still like statues in their
velveteen-backed seats in the Beeswax Palace, the variegated audience was being
drawn bit by bit into the landscape each saw, the landscape that conformed to
the illusion that each and every one held dear. They saw what they wanted to
see.
The young Barbara Selkirk had dreamed of
a dramatic life, the middle-aged Barbara would have settled for a melodramatic
life but the bordering-on-elderly Barbara had less rather than more come to
terms with the simple reality that her life hadn’t been a roller-coaster ride
but rather a daily round on a carousel with stationary horses and a musical
repertoire of trite waltzes. Imagine, then, the palpitations of her heart when
there on the proscenium of the Beeswax Palace the long entryway to Southfork
Ranch lay before her as if awaiting her assumption of the throne of the dynasty
she had been destined to found before fate had played its cruel joke and the
stork had gone off course, depositing her not on the stage set of Dallas but in a low-rent variant of the
house in which Beaver Cleaver got his first cavities.
A long, breathy note emerged from
Buddy’s flute and expanded to fill all the empty space within the Beeswax
Palace. Another followed. Another. A melody was woven from the threads of sound
energy that vibrated upon the tympana of those present. The melody had a
come-hither quality, hither being found beyond the vanishing point of the
visible horizon of the stage upon which all gazes were fixed.
So fixed were the gazes that neither
Ralph Selkirk nor even state trooper Gibbons were cognizant of the vanishing of
the person seated beside them. Now you see ‘em, now you don’t!
Before long, few were left to be seen.
Ten little Beeswax peoples sittin’ in a line/One disappeared and then there
were nine, and so on.
Ralph Selkirk disappeared down the
access tunnel of the Cheyenne Mountain underground command center, burdened
with the responsibility of becoming the first (and last) US president to
unleash an all-out preemptive nuclear strike on Dr. Lao’s Chicom relatives, the
Rooskis, the Mooselings in Eye-Ran and Eye-Rack, purty much any damn furriner
you might care to name.
Quique Morales watched the parallel
line of street-lamps bordering the boulevard blur as he pedal-to-the-metalled
the fastest low-rider ever made. He was headin’ down that long, lonesome
highway and…
The Beeswax peoples present followed
Buddy’s tune as he stepped into a darkness just beyond what each could see.
“Behind the cuhtain, Beeswax peoples!” Dr.
Lao shouted from somewhere unseen, somewhere in the darkness beyond the visual
perceptual range of Beeswax peoples. “Follow Buddy!”
And so, one after another they did,
passing from the perceptual plane of their idealized selves—the shadows upon
the wall of Plato’s cave—into what lay beyond the curtain and into Buddy’s
cave, within which no shadows exist: uncharted territory traversed by Buddy and
Dr. Lao but precious few others.
One by one they went.
What did they see?
Ah, well, that remains to be seen: does
it not?
Suffice it to say that one must see it
for oneself.
Beyond that, there is nothing further
to be seen.
No seminar, no shamans, no anything, no
nuthin’!
Fade to black.
And then…?
Fiat
Lux!
