seven
Main Street is as dead as ever. There’s a blinding white light at the water-tower end of it and Jesus standing in the centre of it in a pale blue robe with his arms out, palms up, like he’s saying how the hell would I know? I’m just a carpenter. He looks like George Harrison in his Eastern religion period working for Ringling Brothers. Whatever amateur made the sign put a red circle on each of his cheeks to make him look healthy, I guess, but healthily ridiculous. On the other end is another giant billboard that says SATAN IS REAL. CHOOSE NOW.
Main Street is bookended by two fields of dirt that never grow a crop. They lie in perpetual fallow, my dad told me. Those words haunt me still.
I can sense that Americans who come here think it’s strange. Main Streets should lead somewhere other than to eternal damnation. They should be connected to something earthly, like roads.
Americans come here to observe our simple ways. Here, life is so refreshingly uncomplicated. The tourists are encouraged to buy a bag of unbleached flour at the windmill and to wander the dirt lanes of the museum village that is set up on the edge of town, depicting the ways in which we used to live. It’s right next to the real town, this one, which is not really real. It’s a town that exists in the world based on the idea of it not existing in the world. It was created as a kind of no-frills bunker in which to live austerely, shun wrongdoers and kill some time, and joy, before the Rapture. The idea is that if we can successfully deny ourselves the pleasures of this world, we’ll be first in line to enjoy the pleasures of the next world, forever. But I’ve never really understood what those pleasures will be. Nobody’s ever come right out and told me. I guess we’ll be able to float around asking people to punch us in the stomach as hard as they can and not experience any pain, which could be fun for one afternoon.
I once had a conversation with my typing teacher about eternal life. He wanted me to define specifically what it was about the world that I wanted to experience. Smoking, drinking, writhing on a dance floor to the Rolling Stones? Not exactly, I told him, although I did think highly of Exile on Main Street. Then what, he kept asking me. Crime, drugs, promiscuity? No, I said, that wasn’t it either. I couldn’t put my finger on it. I ended up saying stupid stuff like I just want to be myself, I just want to do things without wondering if they’re a sin or not. I want to be free. I want to know what it’s like to be forgiven by another human being (I was stoned, obviously) and not have to wait around all my life anxiously wondering if I’m an okay person or not and having to die to find out. I wanted to experience goodness and humanity outside of any religious framework. I remember making finger quotations in the air when I said religious framework. God, I’m an asshole. I told him that if I heard one more person say it wasn’t up to him or her to judge, it was up to God, while, at the same time, they were judging their freakin’ heads off every minute of every day (I mean basically they had judged that the entire world was evil), I would put a sawed-off. 22 in my mouth and pull the trigger. I told him I didn’t know what the big deal was about eternal life anyway. It seemed creepy to want to live forever. And that’s when he threw me out. I’m not saying he was wrong or anything, I just couldn’t ever figure out what was going on. It seemed like we were in some kind of absurd avant-garde theatre, the way our conversations sometimes went.
I once suggested that it was a really risky gamble to bet everything we had in this world on the possibility of another world, and in five seconds he was leading the entire class in prayer.
Please Almighty Father, we just ask you to bring Nomi back within your fold. We just ask you for a miracle this afternoon, dear Jesus. (Was he praying to God, the Father, or Jesus Christ, the Son? If you’re going to terrorize the flock with spontaneous prayer, at least pray to whom it may concern.)
We’re kind of a cult with pretend connections to some normal earthly conventions like getting dressed in the morning (thank God, Menno liked to cover up) and going to work or school, but that’s where it ends.
There’s not a lot of interest in the present tense here. And it’s only slightly disconcerting that everyone’s related. If a Mennonite couple divorces do they still get to be cousins? Oh yeah, hilarious. Tash once said to my mom: Oh, so it’s wrong to move any part of one’s body in time to music but it’s perfectly okay to penetrate members of one’s extended family? My mother told her not to be silly.
Silly was Trudie’s ultimate crime. Okay, she’d say, now you’re being silly, and then we knew it was time to shape up. We’d gone too far.
The Mouth of Darkness loves the word groovy and the expression simply put. Simply put, we are not a groovy people. He’s in love with the notion of shame and he traffics the shit like a schoolground pusher, spreading it around but never personally using. He’s not a fire-and-brimstone guy. That’s not really our speed. Too animated. Too much like dancing.
He reminds me of one of those statues on Easter Island. I’ve seen photos of him as a boy and even then he looked like unforgiving granite. Although my grandma once showed me a picture of him sitting in a canoe smiling, looking relaxed and happy, with the sun setting behind him. He’s holding his paddle straight up in the air like a spear. I often stare at that picture and wonder what he was thinking about and what happened to the happy little boy before he turned into The Mouth. Well, actually, that sounds really stupid, like the beginning of a lame flashback. Cue the spinning tunnel. I don’t really think about him that much. It would be like thinking about time, the nature of time. How it controls you, determines your destiny, and ultimately destroys you.
I do know, because everyone in town knows and doesn’t talk about it, that The Mouth had some very bad experiences in his life when he was younger (oh, hmm, tell me…and what’s that like?) and that after those experiences he came back to Shitville to rule with an iron fist. That might have been what that upheld paddle was all about. I think he had tried to rebel against the thing he came back later to stand for and while living in the city doing God knows what he…I’m not sure…a girl ditched him, I think. Wouldn’t have him as her sunbeam. After he’d opened his heart to her and then mistakenly asked her to marry him. (Flash for Uncle Hands…it was the period of free love, dude.) And he couldn’t write poetry like the Beats and was mocked for it. And for his clothing that tried too hard and his eagerness to be hip and his inability to shave properly (don’t ask me — Trudie told me this) and countless other crimes of youth and eventually he gave up and came back here full of renunciations and ideas of purging every last bastion of so-called fun in this place and a greatly renewed interest in death and a fresh loathing of the world. In a nutshell. If I’d been his ringside coach I would have said now please get back in there. Re-enter the world. Just tone it down. Keep your mouth shut a little more often. Try again for the love of God Almighty!
A few months ago I was walking home from Travis’s place and The Mouth’s house was on the way. It was around three in the morning and the entire town was dead and dark except for the sparkly streets and car tops which were shiny from melting snow. Just as I was walking past his house a light came on in his kitchen, the little stove light, and for some reason I stopped on the sidewalk to look. I saw The Mouth pass by the window, slowly, in a faded green housecoat he’d only half-heartedly closed with what looked like an old tie. I stared at his profile as he stood with his hands on the stove, a little bent over, head down and motionless. He stood like that for a while. The only sound I heard was water dripping out of somebody’s drainpipe. Then he raised his head and walked, again, very, very slowly, to his fridge and he opened the top freezer section of it and took out a pail of ice cream. Maybe rainbow ice cream. Maybe Heavenly Hash. Then he took the pail and disappeared from view for a few seconds and then returned with a spoon and put the pail down on the stove, under the little light, and opened it up and started to eat. He ate and ate and ate, not like a pig or anything, just steadily and continuously for at least twenty minutes, maybe half an hour.