Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins Page A

like, it is no news at all.
    Man is not as good as he thinks he is. (Nor as bad, for that matter, but let's not complicate things.) He has certain needs, demands certain services which in reality are probably healthly and natural, but to which in time's passage and as a result of odd quirks in his ethos, he has ascribed (or allowed his religious leaders—often guilt-warped, psychopathic misfits—to ascribe) negative values. In the queerest of paradoxical metamorphoses, honest desires change into taboos.
    To simply “say” that a desire is immoral—or, resorting to even flimsier abstraction, to deem the fulfillment of a desire
illegal
—does not eliminate the desire. It does not eliminate anything except straightforwardness. It creates, in addition to a climate of deception, an underworld into which men “descend” in order to partake of Code B services not permitted under the provisions of Code A. Society hires armed goons to force itself to conform to Code A, but a greater sum of money is spent each year in the surreptitious enjoyment of the services provided by Code B. The underworld persists because society needs it, insists upon it, supports it (at the same time that it denies and persecutes it, of course).
    But enough of that. Let's simply say that according to Code A, Plucky Purcell—drug dealer and abortionist's agent—is a criminal. Under the reality of Code B, however, he is dutifully serving the interests of his fellow man.
    IV
    Although there is probably no such thing as a “typical” citizen of the underworld, Purcell would not conform to any man's conception of the ordinary criminal. For one thing, he doesn't look like a dealer. The genetic system responsible for his physique must have plagiarized openly from the Belvedere Apollo. His face, too, is beautiful, although its classical composition is inclined to crumble when he indulges his goofy grin. Man, Purcell has a grin like the beer barrel polka. A ding-dong daddy grin. A Brooklyn Dodger grin. A grin you could wear to a Polish wedding. His smile walks in in woolly socks and suspenders and asks to borrow the funny papers. You could trap rabbits with it. Teeth line up inside it like cartridges in a Mexican bandit's gunbelt. It is the skunk in his rosebush, the crack in his cathedral.
    Purcell's methods are as atypical as his looks. He caters, for example, to an exclusive clientele: his services are available only to artists. Now if Plucky has ever in his life suffered a creative impulse, he either successfully suppressed it or satisfied it under cover of darkness. There are no indications that he is a frustrated artist. Yet, for reasons which his friends have never adequately explored, he attached himself to a wide circle of painters, sculptors, film makers and poets. In fact, among artists on both coasts of America there is hardly a more familiar face. Our most rigorous and challenging geniuses have tasted his dope; their girl friends, models and wives have availed themselves of his medical connections. Moreover, he has been a bodyguard to artists in peril, a baby-sitter for those who did not take advantage of his clinical references and a cherished dinner guest of the great and the obscure. (Although it did not make the papers, a Pulitzer Prize winner once showed up to go his bail.) Did Purcell, convinced of artists' traditional-mythical appetites for sin, and aware, too, of their insulation and intelligence, merely see in the creative minority a safe and steady market for his wares? Or did he recognize that despite the attention paid art today (though actually it is “culture” and not art that draw the light), despite the historically proven importance of the artist to society, artists are still second-class citizens who might need to be served and protected by an agent sensitive to their socio-economic deprivations and emotional demands? Or, is the Mad Pluck genuinely, personally moved by artisthood, its ideas and its works? Well,