The wonderful Wizard of Oz.
***
“If ever a whiz of a Wiz there was,
“It was the Wizard of Oz.” *
And so on.
Hi ho.
* Copyright (c) 1939, renewed 1966 Leo Feist, Inc., New York, N.Y.
Chapter 43
MELODY and Isadore went down to Wall
Street today – to visit Isadora’s large family, the Raspberries. I was invited to become a Raspberry at one time. So was Vera Chipmunk-5 Zappa. We both declined.
Yes, and I took a walk of my own – up to the baby’s pyramid at Broadway and Forty-second, then across Forty-third Street to the old Daffodil Club, to what had been the Century Association before that; and then eastward across Forty-eighth Street to the townhouse which was slave quarters for Vera’s farm, which at one time had been my parent’s home.
I encountered Vera herself on the steps of the townhouse. Her slaves were all over in what used to be United Nations Park, planting watermelons and corn and sunflowers. I could hear them singing “Old Man River.” They were so happy all the time. They considered themselves very lucky to be slaves.
They were all Chipmunk-5’s, and about two-thirds of them were former Raspberries. People who wished to become slaves of Vera had to change their middle names to Chipmunk-5.
Hi ho.
Vera usually labored right along with her slaves. She loved hard work. But now I caught her tinkering idly with a beautiful Zeiss microscope, which one of her slaves had unearthed in the ruins of a hospital only the day before. It had been protected all through the years by its original factory packing case.
Vera had not sensed my approach. She was peering into the instrument and turning knobs with childlike seriousness and ineptitude. It was obvious that she had never used a microscope before.
I stole closer to her, and then I said, “Boo!”
She jerked her head away from the eyepiece.
“Hello,” I said.
“You scared me to death,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said, and I laughed.
These ancient games go on and on. It’s nice they do.
“I can’t see anything,” she said. She was complaining about the microscope.
“Just squiggly little animals that want to kill and eat us,” I said. “You really want to see those?”
“I was looking at an opal,” she said. She had draped an opal and diamond bracelet over the stage of the microscope. She had a collection of precious stones which would have been worth millions of dollars in olden times. People gave her all the jewels they found, just as they gave me all the candlesticks.
Jewels were useless. So were candlesticks, since there weren’t such things on Manhattan as candles any more. People lit their homes at night with burning rags stuck in bowls of animal fat.
“There’s probably Green Death on the opal,” I said. “There’s probably Green Death on everything.”
The reason that we ourselves did not die of The Green Death, by the way, was that we took an antidote which was discovered by accident by Isadora’s family, the Raspberries.
We had only to withhold the antidote from a troublemaker, or from an army of troublemakers, for that matter, and he or she or they would be exiled quickly to the afterlife, to The Turkey Farm.
There weren’t any great scientists among the Raspberries, incidentally. They discovered the antidote through dumb luck. They ate fish without cleaning them, and the antidote, probably pollution left over from olden times, was somewhere in the guts of the fish they ate.
“Vera,” I said, “if you ever got that microscope to work, you would see something that would break your heart.”
“What would break my heart?” she said.
“You’d see the organisms that cause The Green Death,” I said.
“Why would that make me cry?” she said.
“Because you’re a woman of conscience,” I said. “Don’t you realize that we kill them by the trillions – every time we take our antidote?”
I laughed.
She did not laugh.
“The reason I am not laughing,” she said, “is that you, coming along so unexpectedly, have spoiled a surprise for your birthday.”
“How is that?” I said.
She spoke of one of her slaves. “Donna was going to make a present of this to you. Now you won’t be surprised.”
“Urn,” I said.
“She thought it was an extrafancy kind of candlestick.”
She confided to me that Melody and Isadore had paid her a call earlier in the week, had told her again how much they hoped to be her slaves someday.
“I tried to tell ‘em that slavery wasn’t for everybody,” she said.
“Answer me this,” she went on, “What happens to all my slaves when I die?”
” ‘Take no thought for the morrow,’ ” I told her, ” ‘for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’ “
“Amen,” I said.
Chapter 44
OLD Vera and I reminisced there on the
townhouse steps about the Battle of Lake Maxinkuckee, in northern Indiana. I had seen it from a helicopter on my way to Urbana. Vera had been in the actual thick of it with her alcoholic husband, Lee Razorclam-13 Zappa. They were cooks in one of the King of Michigan’s field kitchens on the ground below.
“You all looked like ants to me down there,” I said, “or like germs under a microscope.” We didn’t dare come down close, for fear of being shot.
“That’s what we felt like, too,” she said.
“If I had known you then, I would have tried to rescue you,” I said.
“That would have been like trying to rescue a germ from a million other germs, Wilbur,” she said.
Not only did Vera have to put up with shells and bullets whistling over the kitchen tent. She had to defend herself against her husband, too, who was drunk. He beat her up in the midst of battle.
He blacked both her eyes and broke her jaw. He threw her out through the tent flaps. She landed on her back in the mud. Then he came out to explain to her how she could avoid similar beatings in the future.
He came out just in time to be skewered by the lance of an enemy cavalryman.
“And what’s the moral of that story, do you think?” I asked her.
She lay a callused palm on my knee. “Wilbur – don’t ever get married,” she replied.
We talked some about Indianapolis, which I had seen on the same trip, and where she and her husband had been a waitress and a bartender for a Thirteen Club – before they joined the army of the King of Michigan.
I asked her what the club was like inside.
“Oh, you know – ” she said, “they had stuffed black cats and jack-o-lanterns, and aces of spades stuck to the tables with daggers and all. I used to wear net stockings and spike heels and a mask and all. All the waitresses and the bartenders and the bouncer wore vampire fangs.”
“Um,” I said.
“We used to call our hamburgers ‘Batburgers,’ ” she said.
“Uh huh,” I said.
“We used to call tomato juice with a shot of gin a “Dracula’s Delight,’ ” she said.
“Right,” I said.
“It was just like a Thirteen Club anywhere,” she said, “but it never went over. Indianapolis just wasn’t a big Thirteen town, even though there were plenty of Thirteens there. It was a Daffodil town. You weren’t anything if you weren’t a Daffodil”
Chapter 45
I tell you – I have been regaled as a
multimillionaire, as a pediatrician, as a Senator, and as a President. But nothing can match for sincerity the welcome Indianapolis, Indiana, gave me as a Daffodil!
The people there were poor, and had suffered an awful lot of death, and all the public services had broken down, and they were worried about battles raging not far away. But they put on parades and feasts for me, and for Carlos Daffodil-11 Villavicencio, too, of course, which would have blinded ancient Rome.
Captain Bernard Eagle-1 O’Hare said to me, “My gosh, Mr. President – if I’d known about this, I would have asked you to make me a Daffodil.”
So I said, “I hereby dub thee a Daffodil.”
But the most satisfying and educational thing I saw out there was a weekly family meeting of Daffodils.
Yes, and I got to vote at that meeting, and so did my pilot, and so did Carlos, and so did every man, woman, and every child over the age of nine.
With a little luck, I might even have become Chairperson of the meeting, although I had been in town for less than a day. The Chairperson was chosen by lot from all assembled. And the winner of the drawing that night was an eleven-year-old black girl named Dorothy Daffodil-7 Garland.
She was fully prepared to run the meeting, and so, I suppose, was every person there.