CHRISTIAN
And
HIS SIX DISCIPLES
BY LARRY CROWELL
Published be Larry Crowell at Smashwords
Copyright 2012 Larry Crowell
Is Jesse Christian really Jesus Christ?
And if he is, will he get out of the nut house?
And why does he want to be President of the
United States?
And how the hell is he leading in the polls?
A whacky political satire where everyone and everything is fairgame.
~~~~
DEDICATION
To Mom.
Some people talk the talk. Mom walks the walk.
Eighty-eight years old and still walking tall.
Thank you for the walking example.
~~~~
FORWORD
I think it was in the nineties. But then again it might have been in the eighties. Both of those decades were pretty hazy. Aw hell, who am I kidding? My whole life has been hazy. Hey, bartender! How about another drink! I’m looking for some clarity here.
Oh Jesus, I’m actually drinking to remember.
Jake
CHAPTER 14 – The First Press Conference
CHAPTER 15 – Beginning To Believe
CHAPTER 16 – The First Advertisement
CHAPTER 17 – The First Miracle
CHAPTER 19 – Campaign Promises
CHAPTER 26 - The Second Miracle
CHAPTER 30 - Man In The Street
CHAPTER 37 - Mansion On The Hill
~~~~
Jake, the reporter, was drunk by now. He was sitting on the concrete curb, six inches from the gutter, waiting for the psychiatric nurse to appear. When he saw her he would confront her.
The nurse left the building. She was five feet tall, light as a feather, and carried the world upon her shoulders.
Jake screamed, “Nurse Rached, Nurse Rached! Aren’t you sorry now you released Jesus Christ from the insane asylum? He’s running for President of the United States.. and might win, for God’s sake!”
The nurse, recognizing the voice, turned and calmly said, “His name isn’t Jesus Christ. It’s Jesse Christian. And yes, a lot of people insist he’s Jesus Christ, and yes, he’s going to get a lot of votes. In fact the election will be very close. And yes, Jake, you were the first to break the story and you only came up with it because you were in the same facility as Jesse and you needed a big story to revive your career after your big breakdown.”
The words froze Jake.
The psychiatric nurse began to walk away, and then hesitating, she turned around and said, “Jesse Christian is the wisest, gentlest, and most caring person I have ever met. It’s a shame you didn’t learn more from him while the two of you were rooming together. And Jake, my name is not Nurse Rached, as you insist on calling me. It’s Nurse Pritchett! And Jesse Christian is not Jesus Christ as half the world is beginning to believe right now because of your stories. But I will say this, Jake, we could all learn from Jesse Christian.”
Nurse Pritchett did walk away this time and as she turned the corner she suddenly stopped, and looking toward the sky, she began to have her doubts. ‘No,’ she told herself, ‘He couldn’t possibly be Jesus Christ. He’s too crazy to be Jesus Christ.’
~~~~
Jake woke up fully clothed in a penthouse suite. He also woke up in a panic. Jake didn’t know where he was.
Out of habit he rolled over and reached for the top drawer of the bedside table. Bypassing the Gideon Bible, he pulled out the phone book. He slowly focused on the cover. New York City. ‘Well,’ he thought, ‘I may be in the wrong bed but at least I’m in the right city. Thank God for small favors.’
Jake used to regale people with his tales of waking up in strange cities and not knowing how he got there. This one should make a great story, he thought. I’ve never waken up in a place this opulent before. No, he thought to himself with a jolt of remorse, they were always dives. The stories were always funny in the telling, but never funny in the happening.
Then the second panic hit. He was supposed to be in L.A. covering the presidential campaign. It was winding down and the election was just around the corner. Damn. Out of habit again he went through his other routine of waking up. His eyes madly searched the room for a bottle. On good mornings there was always something left in the bottle. Better mornings meant there was enough left. His eyes zeroed in on a bottle on top of the T.V. A quart that was three-quarters full. Vodka. His drug of choice. The label was opulent too. Better than he could normally afford. Life is good, he thought.
He made his way to the television set and was tempted to turn it on to the news channel to see if he had missed anything important. No, first things first, and he throttled the bottle by its neck and he headed for the bathroom.
The first drink was always the toughest. He had to do it over the bathroom sink. Sometimes it just wouldn’t stay down. The second one usually did. Over the years he had mastered the fine art of throwing up while standing up. More dignified that way. It was only when nothing would stay down and he was reduced to the dry heaves that he knelt to the porcelain altar.
As he stood at the bathroom door he looked at the spacious suite. The place was huge. And that’s when she walked out of the kitchen.
She was wearing a heavy oversized terry cloth robe that hotels of this type provided. The type that if you don’t steal one it’s only because you already own one. Her hair was wet, she wore no makeup, and she looked like she hadn’t slept for several days. And she was probably still the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.
Her name was Judy and she was sixteen years old. Along the campaign trail she became known among the media and then the nation at large as Judy, the teenaged prostitute. Actually it was a gross misnomer because Judy was still a virgin.
In fact, Judy had only touched one penis in her sixteen years. It had belonged to her stepfather. Late one night while her mother was asleep he had slipped into Judy’s bedroom and demanded that she touch it. Touch it she did. She almost wrung it off his body. She touched it with a vengeance.
The next day when her mother refused to believe her story, and her stepfather, walking around the room gingerly, rather than fatherly, suggested with much concern that maybe Judy needed psychiatric help, Judy, like so many other young girls before her, left home and made her way to the big city. That was three years ago.
Judy could technically be called a prostitute because she engaged in making a living at sex. She worked in an adult bookstore where customers could buy magazines, movies, and sexual paraphernalia or if they didn’t want to wait till they got home to find their release, they could go to small enclosed booths where they would feed quarters into a slot to watch pornographic movies and relieve themselves on the spot. Or with a bit of persuasion, you could invite another man to join you in your small closeted area.
Judy worked in another section of the sexual superstore. For customers who tired of the slick magazines and grainy movies, and wanted to see a live naked woman, they would venture into somewhat larger booths and instead of feeding quarters into a slot, they would feed dollars. As the money came in, a curtain would draw back and behind a thick glass partition there would be a live woman behind it. The woman would start her show fully clothed and as the money came in the clothes would come off. Should the money stop coming in the curtain would close on the act. The curtain would usually only stay shut for a few seconds.
As more money came in the woman would begin to touch herself as the man on the other side of the glass was almost certainly doing himself. There were also an assortment of dildos and vibrators lying about on the woman’s side and for enough money the woman would begin to fill every orifice with them. The feeding of money became frenzied as the orifices were filled. These women made a lot of money. And lived in their own personal hell.
Judy’s act was different. When the curtain parted on Judy’s most private part, and the smells of sex were evident, she could be seen engrossed with a big, thick book. She was curled around the book and studying it. She was wearing a light blue T-shirt, no bra, and pink panties. Her only props were the big thick book, a notebook, and a pencil. She was a girl doing her homework. The men who watched her felt like the neighborhood boy who would risk life and limb to climb the tallest tree to witness this sight.
Judy would read intently for a while, and then stop as if pondering a thought, and then go back to reading. The most erotic thing she would do at this time would be to wet the end of her pencil with her tongue and take a few notes.
Judy would continue to study, changing positions naturally. She would move from her side, to her stomach, to her back. Occasionally she might tap the eraser of her pencil on her lower lip. She would never look at the men on the other side of the glass.
After more money came through the slot, she would check the door to her cubicle to make sure it was locked, almost as if she didn’t want her parents to walk in unannounced, and then she would take off her T-shirt to reveal breasts that had developed much too early. The panties remained.
She would stand in front of the glass as if she were a young girl in front of a mirror, uncertain if she were pleased with the reflection. She would touch her breasts as if she had just discovered them. She would gently run her fingers over them, then palm them, then squeeze them together. Would she let the schoolboy sports star touch them after the dance this weekend? Her nipples were hard and so were the men.
She would then slowly remove her panties, and while standing in front of the glass she would blush. Then very slowly she would reach down with her index finger and lightly touch herself. She would only do it for an instant and it always caused her to shudder.
When Judy shuddered, no man ever lasted longer than a few strokes more. And no man ever complained that the show wasn’t graphic enough. Maybe had she worn a fig leaf it would be considered raunchy.
The men would always leave satisfied in more than one way. They were the young neighborhood boy again. Sex was a mystery then, the fumbling and fondling in the back seat of the car. Sex was sweet then, it was a journey and it hadn’t reached the destination of a sexual superstore.
When Judy’s day was over she would leave the frantically moving fists and the crumpled up tissues on the floor and make her way back to her sparsely furnished apartment. Once there she would count her money and determine how much she could give to the homeless shelter located around the block and whose funding had been drastically cut. Judy was usually able to give over fifty per cent of her earnings because she didn’t drink, smoke, or use drugs. She didn’t even watch TV. Her only luxuries were the big, thick books.
The irony of Judy’s act at work was that it wasn’t an act. She was really studying the books. They were used textbooks dealing with philosophy and theology and even though Judy had only finished the seventh grade before leaving home at thirteen, she had no difficulty grasping the concepts held in the books. Judy had a measured IQ of 224.
The teenaged prostitute who was a virgin, had an IQ of 224, and was possibly the most beautiful woman in the world, became a media darling during the presidential campaign. When questioned about her time working at the adult bookstore, Judy would look straight into the camera and reply, “Lots of people are prostitutes. There are business prostitutes and there are political prostitutes and most of them pretend that they aren’t prostituting themselves. Well let me tell you this: in all my time at the adult bookstore I never bent over and kissed anybody’s ass!” Half of America would cringe when she said this, while the other half would want to leap off their couch and high-five the TV set. Judy may have been even more beautiful when she was angry.
When the interviews were over and she had calmed down, Judy would usually start kidding around with the camera crew and would inevitably tell her favorite joke. It went like this: A young girl asked her mother where babies came from. The mother felt like the time was right to tell her and went on to explain to the little girl how daddy would put his penis into mommy’s vagina and that’s where babies came from. The young girl looked confused and said, “I understand the penis and vagina part, but the other night I peeked in your bedroom and you had daddy’s penis in your mouth. Do you get babies that way?” The mother slowly smiled and said, “No, sweetheart, that’s how you get jewelry.”
Judy was not allowed to tell this joke on national television but if she had, it might have better explained her views on prostitution. It may have also explained why Judy never wore jewelry.
Judy did have a young girls dream about jewelry however. Maybe it wasn’t even a young girl’s dream. Judy dreamed about one day having a wedding band on her finger. To her, a thin gold wedding band would be more impressive than the Hope Diamond. ‘But it will have to be a good man,’ Judy told herself. ‘Somebody like Jesse.’
Judy was Jesse Christian’s first disciple. They met while being held in the insane asylum.
~~~~
When Jake saw Judy walking from the kitchen he made the decision of not taking his first drink over the bathroom sink. He would take it right in front of her, consequences be damned, and he would be cool while doing it. The drink would stay down even if it killed him in the process.
As a youngster he had watched the black and white movies that came out of Hollywood and the hero always seemed to be a hard drinking man, a real man who could throw back a shot of whiskey and wouldn’t flinch. Jake tilted the bottle of vodka back while saying his silent prayer. ‘Please, God, let it stay down.’
He raised the bottle, took a long swallow, and as his stomach revolted, his already red eyes began to water. ‘Damn,’ he thought, ‘Hollywood he-men never had their eyes to water.’ But God answered his prayer. The drink stayed down.
Jake was forty years older than Judy. He was fifty-six years old yet he wanted to impress this teenager. Hell, if she were ten years older he would make a play for her. That would only make her thirty years younger than him. Jake was having delusions of grandeur. In his prime he was quite the ladies man. Now he was quite repulsive. Delusions of grandeur were scarier than delirium tremens because you didn’t know they were happening. At least D.T.s got your attention.
Jake looked at Judy in the oversized bathrobe that was swallowing her up and he knew in that instant that he would never try to touch her. He also knew without a doubt that he would kill anyone who tried to harm her. Jake didn’t like the idea of caring this much about another human being. He thought he had shed those feelings long ago. There had only been one other person he had felt this protective towards. That had been his mother, and his caring hadn’t helped. And he had been mad at God ever since.
Jake was surely not known as a man of high moral standards. He had justified and rationalized every unacceptable behavior in the book. When he couldn’t find the excuses he found the liquid salve that assuaged the guilt. Yet he forced himself to believe that he still had a thread of common decency about him. He had to believe that for sometimes that thread was all he had to hang onto.
Judy looked at Jake with a mixture of pity and disgust, with pity tilting the scales oh so very slightly. At one time the man was talented beyond belief, a sorcerer of sentences, a man who in a paragraph or two could make you believe that three times three was ten. He was tenacious in looking for an angle, an angle that might mangle a reputation, but that was the cost of being a high profile investigative reporter. He was ruthless. He was the perfect journalist.
Judy had heard that he had always been a heavy drinker and that somewhere along the way he had crossed the line into chronic alcoholism. Jake probably would have laughed and said, ‘I don’t cross lines, I leap over them.’ And that may have been true. The man had made a name for himself fast, and fast was his favorite word. Life in the fast lane. He once said while extremely drunk, ‘I am a world renowned journalist. I don’t read about things happening, I see things happening. And then I let you in on them.’
Had Jake ever studied any kind of theology, Judy thought, he would know that through the history of time, the fastest lane was always littered with the waste of human lives.
Jake, after having stomached his first drink, began another routine in his life: the song and dance. He didn’t want Judy to know, how he didn’t know, why they were both here. As nonchalantly as possible, while scrambling to make sense, he said, “I know why I’m in New York, but tell me again why you’re here and not in L.A. helping Jesse with the campaign?”
Jake had lots of experience with coming out of blackouts with no idea of what had happened or what was going on, but handling it brilliantly nonetheless. He would begin with a series of distracted questions, and then with the answers that were given, he would slowly fill in the missing pieces of the puzzle himself. Sometimes though, it was like cramming a square peg into a deep, dark hole. This was one of those times.
Judy stared at him and the scales swung to utter disgust. Her gaze centered someplace at the back of his head, and she said, “There’s ice and mixers in the kitchen. Fix yourself a drink because you’re going to need it.”
Even Jake knew that this was not the time to try to make light of what was obviously a bad situation. He would throw a drink together and play even dumber about how he ended up back in New York. He would actually listen.
The kitchen was as finely appointed as the rest of the penthouse and he found a heavy pint glass best suited for beer, filled it with ice, and poured the vodka almost to the top. With the ice crackling its protest, he splashed just enough orange juice in the drink to slightly change its color. As the OJ made its way to the bottom, the glass looked like a lava lamp thrown into reverse. Breakfast of losers, he mused.
Judy was already seated at the kitchen table and when Jake hesitated, she evenly said, “Sit down. You don’t want to hear this standing up.”
He had seen a pack of cigarettes on the counter, and lit his first of the day. The usual wet cough followed. Sitting down, taking a medium size drink, and then stirring it again with his finger, he waited to take his other medicine.
Judy didn’t waste any time. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
No preliminaries, no easing into it, no foreplay whatsoever, just, ‘What’s the last thing you remember?’
Jake stared at his drink, took a long drag from his cigarette, took a longer swallow from his drink, and let the wheels churn in his head for a full ten seconds before he murmured, “I remember Alaska. Vaguely.”
“You remember Alaska,” repeated Judy while rolling her eyes only the way a teenager can do it.
“Yeah, I remember Jesse wandering into the wilderness and none of us knowing where he was or what he was doing. God, I hated Alaska. I always thought that hell would be hot. Hell is cold! Fucking icebergs everywhere.”
Yeah, Judy thought, you hated Alaska but you loved Hawaii. Said it was heaven on earth. Campaigning in Hawaii and Alaska had been Jesse’s idea and the campaign manager had almost had a seizure at the suggestion. He had pointed out to Jesse that they needed to be where the electoral votes were, that they needed to be in a place like Texas. At that point, Jesse rolled his eyes almost as well as a teenager.
The campaign manager’s name was Thomas. He had been an advertising guru in New York. He possibly had the brightest mind on Madison Avenue and had a thirty year track record of highly successful ad campaigns. He could force feed ice cream to Eskimos.
Thomas had been in the room down the hall from Jesse in the insane asylum. Thomas was Jesse’s second disciple.
“The last thing you remember was Alaska?” Judy repeated, and Jake drained a third of his drink.
“No, wait a second. I think I remember us coming back to L.A. Yeah, when Jesse walked off the plane he was mobbed by the media wanting to know about that wilderness thing. Yeah, I think I remember that.”
Judy looked at him in disbelief and the scales slowly swayed back to pity again. Judy realized that Jake had been in a three-week blackout. He probably didn’t remember a single event.
“We got back from Alaska three weeks ago,” she said and waited for it to sink in. “Are you sure you don’t remember anything about the last three weeks?” And the panic in his eyes gave her the answer.
He gulped down the remainder of his drink while the wheels churned faster in his brain. Three weeks in a blackout. That was a record for him. “What’s the date?” he demanded. Judy told him.
Jake shot out of his chair and screamed, “That means the election was yesterday!” And just as he was going to ask who won, his stomach churned harder than his brain, and he ran to the bathroom and began to throw up.
~~~~
Jake was brought to his knees this time and it didn’t matter if one was in a fleabag motel or a penthouse suite, heaving your guts was heaving your guts.
As badly as he wanted to know who won the election, he couldn’t keep his head out of the toilet. When he finally felt like he had reached a reprieve, he got up and walked across the spacious tile floor to the sink. ‘If I missed the entire election I can at least wait another minute to find out who won,’ he told himself, as he splashed cold water on his face and rinsed out his mouth. He tried not to focus on his reflection in the mirror. ‘A three week blackout. Jesus.’
He slowly emerged from the bathroom and when Judy saw him coming she began to fix him another drink. Her mix included a healthier dose of orange juice than his did. She set the drink in front of his chair as Jake sat down.
She had never seen him quite like this before. There wasn’t even a hint of arrogance in his eyes or his voice as he looked up at her and quietly asked two simple questions. “Who won?” and “Where’s Jesse?”
It took Judy four hours to cover the missing three weeks in Jake’s life. He drank and smoked throughout the entire session and his emotions ran an obstacle course. He raced past shock, climbed a wall of wonderment, and crawled through a tunnel of discovery, and finally, finding something light and easy near the end of the course, he laughed so hard that Judy was forced to join him and as the two of them wiped tears of joy from their eyes, Jake contemplated the idea that maybe truth was stranger than fiction.
After four hours Jake was still attentive but he was also very intoxicated. As he stood and staggered to the counter for yet another drink, Judy kindly said, “You’ve processed a lot of information in a short period of time. Don’t you think you should lie down for a while? I’ll answer any questions you might have after you get some rest.”
Jake started to say something but then backed off. What he said instead was, “You’re right. I promise I’ll have just one more drinky-poo before I take my nappy-poo. I just need to ask this right now. What the hell are we doing in this TajMahal anyway?”
Judy smiled as if she had been wondering when he would finally ask it. “You know Hutch Hutchison?”
“Of course I know Hutch. He’s made more illegal campaign contributions to the Republicans than anybody. And the competition is tough in that field. It’s amazing he can keep that much money under the rock that he slithers out from under. What does Hutch Hutchison have to do with.. aw shit, Judy. Tell me this isn’t Hutch’s place.”
“No, this isn’t Hutch’s place. Hutch lives in the most awful looking mansion in the universe. It’s so big that he asked that it be named the fifty-first state. No, this is his pretentious hotel; this is where he takes his mistresses and his suite is ours for the next three months.”
Jake just stared at her. “And just how did we gain the use of the asshole’s suite? And what is this about ‘our’? What’s this ‘we’ crap?” His eyes tried to stay focused on Judy, tried to stay focused on anything for that matter, but his mind was set on a question. “Are you sleeping with Hutch?” he asked as softly as possible.
Judy didn’t respond softly. She screamed and swore like a sailor. A vulgar sailor. If it’s true that a beautiful woman becomes even more beautiful when she’s angry, then Judy’s radiance would have made Ray Charles hide under the piano in the parlor.
“How dare you accuse me of going to bed with Hutch! I can’t stand him or his type. This was strictly a business deal. The only propositioning that went on was how long he would let us stay here.”
Jake looked at her warily and noted the heavy marble ashtray near her hand. Heavy marble ashtrays might be great for impressing people but could be deadly if thrown by a beautiful teenage virgin prostitute with a genius IQ who probably had a good throwing arm to boot.
“Judy, I’m sorry. I apologize from the darkest reaches of my heart. Just please calm down and tell me how we ended up here. Everything you’ve told me so far is so crazy that I’m willing to believe anything right now, which up to a minute ago included thinking that you might have slept with Hutch Hutchison. Judy, this is getting strange even by my standards.”
Judy didn’t mean to laugh but she did anyway. Jake was exasperating to the extreme but in the next instant he would become this disarming little boy who was curious and clueless.
She then shook her hair about and looking at a spot just above his head, she took a deep breath and said, “I know you’re going to be mad when I tell you this, but Hutch had sent word to me through one of his underlings that he wanted me to do a private show for him.” When Jake opened his mouth to protest, Judy held up a hand, and like a child obeying a traffic officer, he stopped. “I know that I told Jesse that I would give up the business but you and I needed a temporary place to live. We have both been evicted from our apartments.” She raised her hand again and he stopped again. “You were evicted because even though Jesse paid you well for being his Press Secretary and we stayed in motels paid for by the campaign fund, you still neglected to pay your rent. You’re four months behind. I was evicted because when the media found out where my place was, they had so many camera crews around that the crack dealers started to complain to the landlord. Said it was bad for their customers.
Look, I did one show for the jerk-off and we now have a quiet place for three months to write the book together.”
Jake raised his eyebrows at this, though one eyebrow was drunker than the other. “Whoa, missy. Back up one sentence and hold that thought.” Jake stood and made his way to the kitchen counter. “The nappy-poo can wait. The drinky-poo demands immediate attention.”
When he sat back down, he looked at her, and started laughing cruelly, “Now tell me about this damn book that we’re supposed to be writing together. Last time I checked, I was the writer in this rag-tag bunch of Jesse’s misfits.”
There is nothing scarier than a teenager who has made up their mind. Judy got a determined look on her face and then she set her jaw, and it may as well have been the jawbone of an ass for she slew every one of Jake’s preconceived notions of his importance to the campaign.
“While you were on that three week bender, who do you think wrote your stories? Who do you think did your press releases? Your style isn’t that hard to copy. I not only got the style down, I almost got the attitude down. That really scared me.
In fact, I did such a good job that the guy from the Washington Post said it was amazing that the more incoherent you got, the more understandable your stories became. So don’t tell me your tales about the civil rights movement, Vietnam, Watergate, and Monica Lewinsky. From the age of thirteen I’ve lived in New York, on my own fending for myself. Who do you think has more street smarts? And as far as IQ’s go.. mine is 224. That’s about 200 points higher than yours has been the last three weeks!”
Judy paused for a second, maybe for effect, maybe just to catch her breath. “Besides that, I’m one of the six disciples. You were just the Press Secretary and you didn’t even have to fend off questions because Jesse answered them all.”
The last statement hurt Jake. He had wanted to be a disciple. That would have made seven of them. They could have called themselves-The Magnificent Seven-even though Jesse was big on humility.
As it was, by Jesse only having six disciples instead of twelve, the big joke among the press corps was that Jesse was into downsizing. When questioned about it, Jesse simply said that if more than six people in the insane asylum had believed that he was Jesus Christ; he would have had more disciples.
The fact that he was never really sure whether Jesse was Jesus, or just insane, is why he wasn’t chosen, knew Jake. ‘Maybe had I pretended to believe,’ he thought. ‘I’ve faked sincerity before.’
Judy interrupted his thoughts with, “You won’t remember this but last week Jesse and all of the disciples planned a way to sneak away from the Secret Service agents and the TV crews and we went to a Chinese restaurant. Felt like we owed them. You decided to do Mexican instead. Doing Mexican meant you did tequila. Which meant you didn’t feel anything. Anyway, it was last call or last dinner or whatever, and Jesse told us that there needed to be a book written about the experience. He knew that all of us would be offered large advances by the biggest publishing houses to tell our individual stories, but Jesse felt like we should all collaborate on it with you being the writer.”
Jake’s ears picked up when he heard that but he was having trouble lifting his chin off his chest.
“Did Jesse really say that?” Jake was slurring now but he was also impressed. Nobody had ever wanted Jake to write a book about them.
“Yes. Jesse felt like you were the person to do it, but under certain conditions. You want to hear them?”
“Oh, fer-s-u-u-r-r-e, Judy. Tell me the conditions. And are they conditions or are they commandments. You know, Jesse added some commandments along the campaign trail.”
Judy was pissed. “Consider them commandments!” Judy was also losing patience. “Look, this is the way it’s going to be. First off, fifty per cent of all profits go to charity. Thirty per cent go to the disciples, five per cent each, and you get the remaining twenty per cent. You either agree to those terms or you’re stuck with writing a book without the disciple’s help or Jesse’s blessing. And should you try to go it alone, we will crucify you!”
She saw Jake open his mouth and she screamed, “Don’t say anything! I’m just getting started!”
Jake took a long swallow from his drink and took a longer swallow from a sixteen year olds lecture.
“Second off, this won’t be your book. We don’t want your slanted, sensationalist view of things. All you will be doing is reporting events as they happened. Jesse said that you would have enough news footage and print resources that you wouldn’t need his input, but that it was imperative that you tell the story through the disciple’s eyes.”
Jake looked at Judy with caution. Jake was a liberal. When it suited him. But Jake also profiled people. With the brain cells that were left, he did a quick evaluation. Judy was angry. Judy was a redhead. Judy was a female.
Jake didn’t say a word.
“Third, and last, I’m going to be staying at the penthouse with you. Someone needs to babysit you and keep you relatively sober and I got the job. Believe me, none of us wanted to do it but Jesse thought I would be best at it. I argued that it wasn’t fair and the least he could do was let me draw straws with the other five disciples. Jesse thought about it and then agreed to the idea. I drew the short straw while Jesse laughed. Then he mentioned something about ‘Life not being fair.’
Jake had to smile. Sounded just like Jesse. And then with a fake smirk on his face he smiled at Judy and said, “Makes you wonder about the argument between predestination and free will, doesn’t it?”
Jake wasn’t sure but he thought he heard Judy mumble in teenagese, ‘Fuck you.’
Patience usually comes in years and Judy was lacking in both.
“So are you going to write the book or what?”
If bloodshot eyes could twinkle, then that’s what Jake’s eyes did, and from a smile that Judy had never seen, Jake replied, “Well, let me make sure I have everything straight. I’m going to write a book while six looney-tune characters tell me what to write. And one of those looney-tune characters is a sixteen year old girl who is going to babysit me, and then after I write this international bestseller, I’ll watch most of the money go to charity.. yeah, I’ll do it. It should make one helluva book.”
Judy was prepared to argue with him and when he so readily agreed to the project she was at a loss for words. Jake was not a loss for words, he was just at a loss of the proper enunciation for them. He was slurring badly.
“Let’s not talk about the book right now. I have some misgivings about it, but if Jesse said he wanted me to write it, then I need to write it. That’s it. Final word.”
Then he took a deep drag from his cigarette and as he spoke both words and smoke came tumbling from his mouth. With his slurred speech, the smoke signals may have been easier to understand. “Ju-Judy, did that bas-turd Hrutchtu-try any ding wit yooo?”
Judy stared at him in amazement. The man is getting ready to embark on the greatest challenge of his career and he’s worried about whether Hutch had tried to molest her. He could be so simpleminded sometimes, she thought. He could also be very sweet.
That’s when she giggled. Judy hated to giggle. She thought it made her seem so immature. But every once in a while the walls fell down and she got to act her age.
“Did Hutch try anything? Puh-lease! Let me tell you what happened. You’ll probably get a kick out of it.
I don’t know if you heard or not, but when I was doing shows at the sex shop Iwould never look at the man, and because of the glass partition, I could never hear how excited the man was becoming. I just did my homework and left.
But with Hutch sitting on the couch five feet away, I could hear him getting very excited. I hadn’t looked at him the whole time but when I thought the time was right and he was breathing very, very hard.. I stared right at him.. and he went limp! He just couldn’t handle it. The only thing that held up was his end of the deal.”
Judy smiled uneasily. “He got dressed real fast after that, threw the keys to the penthouse on the table, and told me he wanted me out of here in three months. Well, anyway, I heard that this place rents for $1,000 a day. I knew that Jesse wouldn’t approve, but let’s face it, we needed a place to write the book. It was for a good cause.”
Jake stared at his drink and thought with remorse, ‘The kid is only sixteen and she’s already fighting the Battle of Semantics.’ The Battle of Semantics was fought on the human front, and you fought for the right to rationalize and justify every unacceptable behavior imaginable. It was fought with key words and catchy phrases. When you were a master at it, you would win all of the battles, yet somehow lose the war.
Jake was a master at it. He was also battle-scarred.
Jesse had talked to him about semantics while they were rooming together in the insane asylum. He spoke very quietly while he was explaining it and when he was finished he suddenly fell back on the bed laughing. God, he had a great laugh.
Then Jesse said, “You know, you and that advertising guy down the hall should get together and invent a board game called Semantics. It would be bigger than Monopoly. What you would do is let people think that they are winning the game when their actions don’t match up with their words. Meanwhile, they’ve got all the money and material things that anybody could ever want and it was all obtained by pretending they were doing the right thing. You know, the fine art of lying to one’s self. Then you throw them a curveball and they find out that they are actually losing. In fact, they are the ultimate losers at life. Kind of, ‘The meek shall inherit the earth’ kind of thing.”
Judy snapped him out of his reverie when she said, “With your sick sense of humor I would have thought you would have found what happened to Hutch funny. What were you just thinking about anyway?”
Jake raised his head slightly and instead of taking a gulp from his drink, he only took a swallow. He smiled and said, “I was just thinking about something that Jesse said. Nothing important.”
Judy looked at him and thought that in spite of himself, Jake really could be a decent person sometimes. And that sometimes, the cynical smirk on his face could actually be replaced by a warm, genuine smile. Like he did just now.
Had Jake been able to read her thoughts he would have been as embarrassed by his warm, genuine smile as Judy was of her giggle.
“Judy, what are you going to do on your eighteenth birthday?”
She was startled by the question and took a moment to collect her thoughts. “You’re talking about the magazine offer aren’t you?” A famous men’s magazine had made a standing offer of one million dollars if Judy would pose nude for the magazine on her eighteenth birthday.
“I don’t know what I’ll do.. a million dollars would feed a lot of people. And that’s what I would do with the money if I did agree to it. Oh hell, I have no earthly idea what I’ll do. I’m just glad that I don’t have to decide now. But hey, you and I ended up getting a penthouse..” And then she started crying.
Jake, like most men, was defenseless against a woman’s tears. It put him in an emotional straitjacket. His mother used to cry.
“Judy, it’s okay,” he began, and then racked his besotted brain for something else to say. Something soothing. Something that maybe Jesse would say, and then he remembered. “Yo, Judy. Remember what Jesse told that used car salesman that was crying that day? He told the guy that God would forgive him, then people would forgive him, and what he had to do was learn to forgive himself. Then Jesse started laughing! Told the guy to get off the cross, that people were waiting in line!”
Judy let out a very unfeminine laugh at that point, more like a snort, and then laughing and crying at the same time, she rose and walked to the kitchen counter. Grabbing a paper towel, she blew her nose like a truck driver.
Beginning to giggle again, she said, “I liked it when Jesse would quote Yogi Berra and say it feels like déjà vu all over again.”
“Yeah, who would have thought that Jesus would have a very weird sense of humor?”
They both laughed some more and then eased into an uneasy silence.
Jake always talked with his hands, and when he tried to break the silence and grasped for the right words to say, his hands began searching the air as if they could capture the proper phrase. His speech was slurred and had he known sign language has hands would have slurred also.
“Judy, I’m five minutes away from passing out and I would prefer the bed over the kitchen table..” and then he stammered more than he slurred. “There is one more thing I need to know. You told me that we’ve been here two days, and what I was wondering.. is, did I, uh, did I.. try anything inappropriate?”
He had a lot of difficulty getting out the word ‘inappropriate’. ‘Inappropriate’ was a difficult word to say when one had been drinking heavily. And ‘inappropriate’ had way too many syllables for a nervous drunk.
Judy almost giggled again but caught herself when she saw how serious he was.
“No,” she said, “You didn’t try anything..” and then unable to avoid the temptation, she mimicked his pronunciation of inappropriate. “In-A pro-opra-ett.”
Then smiling softly and blushing beautifully, she said, “Let me put it this way. You have been a drunken lout in every respect except for that one. In that respect, you were a perfect gentleman.”
The relief on his face spoke volumes: coherent, unslurring volumes.
“I’m glad to hear that,” he mumbled as he got up and began his wobbly way back to the bedroom. And then the thought came to him. ‘I’ve actually developed a conscience. I knew that Jesse would be bad for me.’
When he reached the bedroom door Judy yelled out, “Hey, you! After you get some sleep, I’m going to get some food in you, even if I have to shove it in your big mouth. We’ve got a book to write.”
He grinned at her and gave her a small salute, and as he started to stumble through the door she called out again, “Hey, you!” And then more softly, “Are you going to remember today?”
Jake looked back at her with possibly the saddest expression that Judy had ever witnessed, and his voice just barely carried these words back to her. “God, I hope so.”
~~~~
Jesse Christian was born 36 years ago in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to Joseph and Mary Christian. Rumor had it that the hospital had turned them away because they didn’t have Blue Cross or something, but that wasn’t true. Actually, they never made it to the hospital.
On the way there Mary had looked at Joseph and screamed, “Pull the car over, you ass!” Even the most saintly of women could, while in the throes of labor, say some unseemly things.
Joseph did as she said. He pulled the car into a Texaco station and there under the Texaco sign, the one with the big star, Mary gave birth to Jesse.
Three married men happened to be at the station at the same time as Mary and Joseph. These men were traveling salesmen who were home that day because it was Christmas.
They were at the service station on Christmas morning because they had not taken the time to read on the boxes of their children’s new toys that batteries were not included. These three guys were not rocket scientists.
The three married men were not in a good mood that morning for when their wives realized that they had not thought to buy batteries for the kid’s toys, they shook their heads and rolled their eyes. The kids, who once more realized that their dad was a dunce, rolled their eyes. And the fathers, who were not looking forward to leaving a warm house on a cold Christmas morning in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, rolled their eyes and muttered obscenities.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in what is known today as third world countries, parents and their children were also rolling their eyes, except that their eyes were slowly rolling to the backs of their heads. They were too weak to move anything else. They were dying of starvation.
This never evened crossed the minds of the three families in Bethlehem that day, though the previous month they had all mumbled a scant prayer on Thanksgiving Day before gorging themselves on turkey and trimmings.
The three married, traveling salesmen were standing sheepishly in line with batteries in hand at the service station counter, when one of them noticed Joseph yelling and gesturing wildly while the front door of his car was wide open.
The three men went running outside to see what the big deal was, and what they saw was Mary stretched out on the front seat of the car giving birth to Jesse. The first man ran inside the service station and screamed for the clerk to call an ambulance. The second man ran to a pay phone to tell his family that he might be a little bit late. The third man, seeing Mary giving birth, made a mental note to call his mistress to see if she had her period yet.
Jesse Christian was born in Bethlehem under a big star. He was also born in the front seat of a Rambler. It was not known if he was conceived in the back seat.
It was not a red-letter day in America’s history. School children would not be forced to memorize this date, though 35 years later when Jesse became known worldwide, all three traveling salesmen would insist that they had aided in Jesse’s birth.
It was just another Christmas Day in the United States of America. The year was 1964. John Kennedy had been assassinated the year before. Lyndon Johnson, a Texan, was pushing through some important civil rights legislation, and most Americans had never heard of a little country called Vietnam.
The next year, 1965, Joseph and Mary, having tired of Pennsylvania winters, decided to move to the west coast. San Francisco. While there, a little district caught their eye and they thought it might make a good place to raise Jesse. The place was called Haight-Ashbury.
~~~~
Jake and Judy had been in the penthouse for ten days now and this one was beginning like the last seven had. It started with the light tapping on his bedroom door and then the gentle voice of Judy saying, “Get your lazy ass out of bed. You have a book to write.”
‘Jeez,’ he thought as he reached for a cigarette, “God accomplished a lot of things in one week. Created the heavens and the earth and all of that stuff, but I bet he could have done it in four days and taken a long weekend if he had a teenage girl breathing down his neck.’
The thought came to him as he lay in bed staring at the ten foot ceiling and an ashtray balanced on his chest, that Judy had been robbed of a lot of experiences by running away when she was thirteen. Then he smiled and mused that she had probably been denied the opportunity to go on a family vacation in the car and every fifteen miles ask her daddy, ‘Are we there yet?’ So now he could be a replacement daddy and listen to her whine, ‘Is the book finished yet?’ This brought a smile to Jake’s face. Jake wasn’t used to smiling in the morning.
His morning routine had changed since the book began. He still woke up with hangovers but instead of immediately drinking indiscriminately until the pain went away, Judy would fix him one large, stiff drink to settle the nerves and before he could have another one she would insist that he would have to eat a breakfast consisting of a stack of pancakes, a large glass of milk, and a small glass of orange juice.
He moaned and groaned throughout the entire meal and complained especially bitterly that the orange juice didn’t taste right. Then Judy would point out that orange juice wasn’t meant to be smothered in vodka and that was how it was supposed to taste. Jake wasn’t sure who was parenting whom.
After breakfast he was allowed a short drink before she chased him into the bathroom to shower and shave. ‘You’re going to look professional whether you act it or not.’ He continued to complain; but he loved it. And she knew it.
When he had made himself reasonably presentable he could sit at his desk and write and drink to his heart’s content. He usually got in a good four hours of both before he took his ‘nap’.
After passing out and reawakening sometime later, the process would begin again except that dinner instead of breakfast would be forced on him. And then he got drunk again.
At the end of a day Jake would have reached the goal of eight workable pages and two stages of intoxication. A glamorous life it was not.
This particular day would be different. Thomas was coming by.
Thomas was the advertising executive Jesse had befriended in the insane asylum and who later became Jesse’s presidential campaign manager. He was also Jesse’s second disciple.
Thomas was five feet four in his elevator shoes but shrunk two inches when forced to wear the paper slippers the insane asylum provided. Thomas had hated the paper slippers for not only making him shorter but for the noise they made around the place. Everybody there got their daily doses of Thorazine and with the combination of the paper slippers and the Thorazine Shuffle, it made for a very eerie sound. Thomas once remarked that they should attach sand paper to the bottom of their slippers and hire themselves out as floor refinishers. The inmates who caught the joke, were so dulled by the Thorazine, they didn’t laugh for a full five seconds.
Besides being short, Thomas was thinning on top, overweight, and to be polite, ungood looking. But after having discovered that success was an aphrodisiac with its own secret powers, he was able to claim almost as many ball breaking ex-trophy wives as blockbuster ad campaigns.
Thomas was burnt out on the advertising business when he was thrust into what he called ‘The Thorazine-R-Us, You Pay Only One Price For Multiple Personalities, Insane Asylum’. He burnt out on advertising at age 58 but still held out hope for at least a couple more ex-wives.
Thomas’ first big foray into the advertising business came when he was handed the account for a children’s breakfast cereal. He came up with a cartoon figure that the kids went wild over, and he ran ads during the Saturday morning kiddie shows. He absolutely loved it when the little brats started gobbling up the sugar-laden junk food. Thomas hated kids.
He would later deny during a congressional hearing that he had included a subliminal message saying, ‘Hey kids, eat the whole box of this sugar shit and drive your parents fucking nuts.’ Thomas didn’t like their parents either.
Later in his career he would go back to cartoon characters but this time he would use the wildly popular creatures to sell cigarettes to young people. Thomas hated teenagers, too.
One advertising extravaganza that especially excited him was when he was able to convince a bunch of yuppie men to go out and spend over $20,000 on macho motorcycles. He preyed on their upcoming mid-life crisis by rewriting the lyrics of a popular song of the sixties and renaming it ‘Born To Be Wimp?’ The ad showed yuppies sitting at their desks crunching numbers and pulling on their suspenders till they heard the roar of a motorcycle outside and they suddenly became leather-clad brutes with something exciting between their legs. Suspender sales fell overnight.
When he took on the ad campaign he had no interest whatsoever in selling motorcycles but he was ecstatic over the idea of thousands of yuppie men splattering themselves all over the highways. Thomas hated yuppie men. He also liked the idea of thousands of women becoming suddenly unattached. He thought there might be another ex-wife amongst them. Thomas did love women.
His last major ad blitz had yuppies rushing to the car lots much like lemmings rush to the sea. Though he had no training in such matters, when Thomas was asked why lemmings would do something so stupid, he would just smile and say, “Two words. Peer pressure.” He would then go on to say that people assumed that just kids and teenagers would succumb to peer pressure, but people in their thirties and forties were even more susceptible to it because the corporate lifestyle had beaten down any source of individuality left in their lives. He would laugh and say, “Hell, corporations started cloning people long before the scientists came up with the idea.”
The vehicle that Thomas pushed on the public and chased these corporate clones, or clowns, to the car lots was called a sport utility vehicle. A S.U.V. A big, clumsy, gas-guzzling vehicle that caused more parking lot mishaps than a woman with a pair of 40’s.
Thomas took the glamorized route of peddling the vehicle. He went after a large segment of the population which was disproportionately image conscious. Never mind that their self- importance was exaggerated.
These were people who wanted to portray the image of needing just such a vehicle to drive to their second home in the country on weekends. The second home that didn’t exist.
Thomas laughed all the way to the bank. He also laughed all the way to his second home in the country.
The real reason Thomas wanted the S.U.V. account was that he envisioned hundreds of thousands of long-legged women, wearing skirts, trying to get out of a vehicle that sat several feet off the ground. Remember that Thomas was short.
While Thomas was in the Thorazine-R-Us etc. insane asylum the psychiatrists had a field day with his short stature and successful station in life. They immediately labeled him with having a Napoleon Complex and then patted themselves on their short backs.
Thomas had his own field day with the diagnosis. He fashioned for himself from an old bedpan one of those funny hats that Napoleon wore, ripped a small hole in his hospital gown so that he could keep his hand tucked near his chest, and insisted on calling Judy ‘my dearest Josephine.’ Thomas didn’t think of himself as being locked away, he thought of it as being a well-deserved vacation. This was his Elba.
Thomas, though, had met his Waterloo in the advertising business.
He was to handle the account for a brand new car company. Having met with the head honchos of said company, he heard them say that they were planning a no-nonsense line of cars. They would be good reliable cars, but they wouldn’t turn any heads in traffic. Just a good car at a decent fair price.
The best thing, they said, was that there would be no haggling on price with salespeople who drooled on you. The price would be a set price.
This would be a car for people with common sense.
Thomas was aghast at such a simple concept. He wondered what was wrong with these people. This is totally un-American, he thought.
Never in his storied career had he been asked to appeal to people with common sense. And never had he drawn such a blank while trying to come up with ideas. It was maddening.