0.2 The funeral of bobo  (Page 7/12)

There was something admirable not only in Maynard’s generosity and the breadth of his vision but also—more so, in fact—in his haplessness, which as time went on came to seem a profound discomfort with success and wealth. Maynard died a material loser and a spiritual winner. The charm that endured about him, the element in his legend that invariably brought a fond smile to your lips when he came to mind, was the involuntary nature not only of his losing but also of his winning. Something in his soul kept him from realizing the dreams of wealth and success that he harbored for himself and for his settlement. At every step of the way, some act of his (most often, as was the case in his dealings with the unfortunate Salish natives, an act of generosity) undid him and left him materially worse off than he was before. He was at the pinnacle of his fortune the moment he first registered claim to his land—the same moment, of course, when his coevals were at the nadir of theirs. They parlayed their land into vast personal fortunes; he parlayed his into a great city—and a dubious legend.

Whatever Maynard’s dreams for himself and his legacy, he lives on in Seattle as a classic divided soul: a man who always managed to work at cross-purposes with himself, consistently undoing his own designs in one way or another. He was Seattle’s first underachiever. And I found myself wondering, standing there that day in the Microsoft parking lot, if Lesser Seattleites—the only true Seattleites—were not still somehow so in thrall to Maynard that we reflexively turned away from chances at wealth or success. In the words of another of my old college professors, a Yale expatriate named Rand Jack, we were “a city of underachievers.” Was our collective lack of ambition a psychological trait inherited from Maynard? More to the point—was mine? Had Maynard so formed his city’s soul that Seattleites forever afterward would yearn more for disrepute than fame and fortune?

It was undoubtedly the Maynard in me that led me to join and lend my typesetting services to a group called Invisible Seattle, which had been formed in 1979 by Philip Wohlsetter and James Winchell, the latter a friend of mine from college. Through most of the 1980s, Invisible Seattle published and performed pieces combating the takeover of Visible Seattle by developers, gentrifiers, and other promoters of pretension. The group published a newspaper, The Zeitgeist , issued proclamations, renamed Seattle landmarks, and put Seattle political and cultural figures on mock trial. Invisible Seattle rechristened the Monorail the “Disorient Express”; set up a network of personal computers at Seattle’s annual Bumbershoot arts festival so that anyone could sit down and write, the collective work eventually compiled, edited and published as a massive collaborative novel entitled Invisible Seattle ; and popped up everywhere in the city, performing various disruptions of one kind or another.

Much of Invisible Seattle’s effort was directed toward honoring the memory of the most important celebrity and symbolic presence in Seattle history: Bobo the Gorilla, who held sway over the regional imagination from his arrival here in 1951 until well beyond his untimely death in 1968. Bobo had been captured in Africa when only two weeks old—he was the youngest gorilla ever to have been captured alive—when his father was killed and his mother captured by William “Gorilla Bill” Said, a self-styled adventurer who made his living selling captured gorillas to zoos. Said sold Bobo to Raymond and Jean Lowman, a couple living in Anacortes, Washington, some 60 miles north of Seattle. The Lowmans tried raising Bobo as if he were a human child. They dressed him in slacks, shirts, and cardigan sweaters, and he lived with them in their home until his habit of breaking everything he touched His favorite activity: throwing. led them to build him a house of his own, adjacent to theirs. The Lowmans and Bobo were a considerable tourist attraction; it was not uncommon for the family to look up from Sunday dinner to see out-of-towners clustered at their window, snapping pictures.