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I heard about it from the Chicken Man. We ran into each other getting off the bus one day, and walked a block or two together until he had to turn left to get to Henrietta’s favorite spot and I turned right to go to the last store in town that sells Chef Chow’s Hot and Spicy Oil in safe quantities. (There’s a place in Lincoln Village that sells it by the liter, which I don’t understand how they get that past the fire inspectors, but I don’t want to risk keeping that kind of thing in my kitchen.) He said the lizards had found out that The Forum was going to be demolished to make room for some over-ambitious north side developer’s plan, and they’d contacted some of the people who’d fought to save it and offered to buy it and move it.
The move had been a complicated affair, because for various reasons the city of Chicago doesn’t have any official knowledge of the lizards. (There are people like me, and most of the city’s jazz aficionados, who’ve found the island or the lizards’ radio broadcasts by various means, but that’s an entirely different thing.) They’d had to set up several shell companies, and I’m still not clear on how they actually got the building to the island. I think they took it apart, piece by piece, brought it out on small boats, and reassembled it.
It doesn’t really matter how they did it; suffice it to say, The Forum was being re-opened with an epic show in two weeks, and the Chicken Man was kind enough to let me know. It being the lizards, there were no tickets. You just had to get there, and then they’d find some way for you to get to at least some of the show. They weren’t worried about crowding; there just weren’t that many die-hard jazz fans around these days, or people who knew about the lizards.
Well, I had a friend with a little rowboat at that time, so I asked if I could borrow it. She thought it was weird, but then again, she was used to me asking for weird favors. Remind me to tell you about the time I needed a neon-pink hockey puck sometime. So she said she’d let me use it although she also said one day she’d be asking what the hell I was using it for. (She hates jazz, or I’d’ve invited her to come along. The lizards don’t mind guests as long as you keep it reasonable.) So I had my little boat, and I put everything I might need in a waterproof bag, including a pair of shoes, and set out. I figured that if I left in the early afternoon, I’d be in plenty of time for most of the excitement, because for once the island was pretty close to shore.
I’d been wondering what the lizards were going to do about all the people who were bringing boats; they’d made a little hole in the shield, on the opposite side from shore, and they sent turtles around to fetch those of us coming from the city who wouldn’t know where to go. That was good; I’d been a little worried about what I was going to do with the boat, since it was a borrowed boat and my friend was expecting it back.
When I landed on the beach, I thanked the turtle who’d guided me in, and walked up the sand to a convenient limestone rock wall. I sat down to put my shoes back on, and while I was tying the first one, some other people landed on the beach. There was a gawky, skinny girl with green hair, and two portly young men, one of whom tripped and fell five times between their boat and the rock wall. They all sat down to put their shoes back on too.
“Hello! Are you here for the grand reopening?”
“Certainly.”
“I’m Bentley Saunders Harrison Matthews the third, but you can call me Rat.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance. I am Victor.”
“These two bozos are Walter Galt,” the one who hadn’t tripped on the way up waved a little, “and Winston Bongo.”
“Have you been here before?” Winston Bongo asked.
“A few times.”
“It’s so great, isn’t it?”
“I thought so.”
“Come on, let’s go find The Forum.”
Rat talked about nothing but James Dean as we walked up the road to The Forum; Winston and Walter ignored her, mostly, except to make comments about a few movies, and Winston told me about his uncle, the Mighty Gorilla. I knew about the Mighty Gorilla, of course, because I watch a lot of late night television. I was duly impressed. It made his tripping on the beach make more sense too, since he claimed it was for practice. Apparently you have to know how to fall or you’ll never be any good at wrestling.
Rat was going into some embarrassing detail about what, precisely, she would do with James Dean, assuming he wasn’t a zombie, because of course even a James Dean zombie would be a problem. Unless there was a cure. I stopped listening to her when she started speculating about zombie James Dean. I assumed that at some point she would talk about something else, and I was right. She exhausted the subject of James Dean’s decay, Walter breathed an unsubtle sigh of relief, and she started in on music. She said she hadn’t been into jazz, but someone had introduced her to late Miles Davis and she’d thought maybe it was worth a try.
Winston rolled his eyes and said, “Like you’d know real music if it hit you in the face.”
“Just because you have some kind of vendetta against The Degenerates, doesn’t mean they’re not music.”
And they were off, bickering as old friends do. Fortunately, we were close enough to the club to hear the music and the sound of crowds. It was a real festival: the lizards weren’t just into jazz. They were also into fried foods, and they’d gotten a bunch of vendors who usually worked the Wisconsin State Fair to come in. I don’t really know why the lizards got into fried food, or state fair food. Or, for that matter, how. It's not like they left the island much. Possibly it was television. Winston and I went exploring the fried food options. There were a lot of them. The Wisconsin state fair takes its deep fried food very seriously. Winston wanted to try the deep fried maple bacon cookie dough; I preferred to stick to the traditional funnel cakes. We both thought the fried pickles were interesting.
There were buskers every few hundred feet, mostly lizards. I thought I saw the Chicken Man and Henrietta, but by the time I worked through the crowd they were gone. I joined back up with Rat, Winston, and Walter, and we all headed for the main attraction. It was a very nice brick building, and they’d certainly done a good job putting it back together. It had a few lizard-style additions, but mostly looked pretty much as it had, just clean and new. There was a crowd milling around near the entrance, and a line snaking around the place, waiting to go in. We joined the line. Everybody was talking and laughing. The person behind us, who appeared to have come alone, was a man with long dreds, who was bouncing a little on the balls of his feet. He saw me notice, and said “This is my first time on the island, and my father used to tell me about the shows he saw at The Forum when he was young, so I’m really excited about being here.”
“That’s amazing. Who did he see?”
"Oh, Nat King Cole, Milt Hinton, a bunch of folks."
Rat had made friends with a woman who looked a little bit like James Dean. Walter and Winston were shuffling awkwardly, trying not to stare; Rat was making unsubtle advances. The woman who looked a little like James Dean was responding enthusiastically. Winston took the opportunity to fall down, with a startling clatter. My new friend looked at him in shock. “Is he ok?”
“Oh, yeah. His uncle’s the Mighty Gorilla, he’s practicing his falls.”
“The Mighty Gorilla? Oh my god, I love the Mighty Gorilla!”
Winston stood back up, brushed off some dust, and said, “I couldn’t help but overhear you discussing my uncle, the Mighty Gorilla.”
Our conversation with our new friend was a welcome distraction from Rat’s, er, lack of conversation with her new friend.
“Uncle Flipping!” Rat shouted. I was amazed that she’d noticed anything but her new friend, but indeed, Flipping Hades Terwilliger, her uncle and master Snarker (according to Winston and Walter’s rather breathless introduction) was waving at us from further back in the line.
“Rat!”
“Come up and join us!”
He did. “Greetings! Walter Galt, Winston Bongo, Rat! Who are your new friends?”
Rat said, “This is Victor, we met him on the beach. This is Jeanne, who I met in line. Victor’s friend is … Victor?”
“This is Brian,” I said, and he nodded.
“Ah. A pleasure,” Flipping Hades said, and shook our hands enthusiastically. “You know, the last time I was here was 1969, just after I got back from Altamont, and the lizards were in the middle of a musical revolution. Their innovations are amazing! You know they actually invented electric guitars?”
“I had no idea,” Walter said.
“They did! And I first had avocado cream pie here on the island,” he said.
Apparently Flipping Hades Terwilliger was also a major avocado enthusiast, who had personally kept thirty-seven varieties of avocado from going extinct and developed an additional fourteen. I found this out later. At the time, I just thought he was a little odd.
“Speaking of which! Walter, did you try the deep-fried avocado-garlic balls?”
Walter said that he had not.
“Oh, they’re wonderful, they’re the reason I go to the Wisconsin state fair every year! You must try them.”
Fortunately for our taste buds, the line surged forward at that moment, and we finally made it into the soothing darkness of the club.
The first band was a pretty solid three-piece, and most of the crowd was dancing at least a little by the end of their set.
The next band was even better. Their trumpet player looked like a Komodo dragon, and played several truly magnificent solos. Their drummer was very creative. The third band had a big band set-up, and it was pretty great too.
The band after that was so different I don’t think anyone in the audience knew what to expect. The lights went even lower, the stage was completely cleared, and a spotlight focused on the center of the stage. An almost translucent lizard wheeled a lime green harp into the center of the stage and went away again. It sat for a minute, while we all shuffled our feet and wondered what to expect. Rat said, “Oh, I think I’ve heard …” and several people shushed her. The entire hall was almost silent in anticipation.
A green lizard, sort of like a chameleon, with wide, round eyes, came onto the stage, holding its tail coiled in its hands. It blinked nervously at us a couple of times, nodded, and scurried behind the harp. It plugged something in, wrapped its tail around the base of the harp, and sat on a stool none of us had noticed. It tipped the harp back, carefully, and rested the side of its head on the pillar of the harp.
It plucked a single string, firmly. The sound was like nothing I’d ever heard before, and it resonated through the still mostly-silent hall. Then the lizard started playing in earnest, and everyone sort of cheered wordlessly, and then a lizard with a theremin came out, and a lizard with drums, and it was just spectacular. It sounds a little weird, I know, but they really are great performers. Sometimes they have dancers. At this show, they had a lizard who is apparently well-known in certain modern dance circles come out and do improv dances. It was very strange, but also beautiful.
After the lizard with the harp was finished, everyone was exhausted. Their set had been very long, and we’d all been standing up for the entire show. Most of us had also been dancing to the music; it was hard not to. Rat said she was going to go home with Jeanne, so Flipping Hades said he’d go home with Walter and Winston. I offered Brian a ride in my boat. We all went our separate ways. I was exhausted, so I snuck back into the house to get a couple more hours of sleep before my mother woke me up and tried to get me to do something “improving,” which she usually did on weekends. Apparently I wasn’t getting enough out of high school, and my musical taste was meaningless to her. Neither of my parents really took the idea of me taking saxophone lessons seriously; I suppose they didn’t think I was dedicated enough. My sister, who was, by this point, married and working as a nurse in a Wisconsin hospital, said I should come up for the state fair this year when I called her on Sunday night. I asked her if she’d tried the deep fried avocado-garlic balls. She said she hadn’t, but that the avocado mango swirl ice cream was pretty good. I couldn't tell if she was serious.
I ran into Rat again a couple of months later — she goes to Genghis Khan High School too. We both skip class a lot and it turns out that we go to the same diner down the street from school — it's a place called Phil's; they do really good omelets and mashed potatoes. She told me she was mostly over James Dean, and that she and Jeanne had broken up after six weeks but it had been a really great six weeks. She seemed willing to go into more detail, but I managed to discourage her. She asked if I’d seen Brian since the show, but I hadn’t; he was in college out of state. Walter and Winston go to a different school, which is why I hadn't run into them. Rat invited me out Snarking; there was a kaiju movie marathon going on she thought I might like, and she said it seemed like I needed to get out more and socialize with my peers instead of the rest of the subnerds at Genghis Khan. I thought she had a point.