In the airport terminal we pass a newsstand. The headline on the cover of Newsweek says, “A Rude Religious Revolution: The Boorists Have Arrived!” Time magazine announces: “The %&!?//$ Road to Redemption.” On a television monitor mounted near the ceiling of the concourse a CNN news presenter says, “Boorists now claim their messiah has been resurrected….”
As we walk toward our gate of departure, my chubby ham-hock legs hurry to keep pace with his long, zombie stride. Loping along, of course he can’t hear me, not while he’s sober, but he maintains a steady patter. To everyone in the airport he must look like an untreated schizophrenic, his not-clean shirt flapping open and untucked. Not that anyone seems upset by the sight of a lunatic dressed in rags yammering to himself. No, now that humanity is assured a permanent seat at the right hand of God, they’re grinning with glee. Their eyes are misted with righteousness.
“Your timing, little dead girl, could not have been better,” says Crescent. “We have bullshit laws about driving sober and laws about always wearing shoes and not owning giant boa constrictors, only we didn’t have laws about the most important stuff: getting saved.” He says, “People were starving to know those rules.”
This new religion, Boorism, makes death look like an all-expenses-paid luxury vacation that lasts until the end of time.
“You created world peace! Nobody’s a gay anymore, or a Jew or a person from Africa,” he rants, forging ahead. “Look at us! We’re all ‘Boors’!”
It’s simple, explains Crescent City. My parents staged a massive publicity campaign to announce that their dead daughter had contacted them from beyond the grave. They told the world that I was now an angel in Heaven, rubbing elbows with the Kennedy brothers and Amy Winehouse, and I had bestowed upon them a fail-safe, surefire blueprint for attaining salvation. They issued a blitz of press releases to blab that I was within the pearly gates, riding a cloud and strumming a harp. Ridiculous as this sounds, this is the milieu of Camille and Antonio.
“Boorism isn’t the real name for our faith,” Crescent says. “That’s just a phony label the media vultures invented to pigeonhole us. Officially we refer to ourselves as apostles of Madlantis.”
Realistically I can’t slight my folks for getting so excited. Their previous theology of “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” must’ve offered scant emotional comfort in the face of their only child being killed on her birthday. Yes, I expired on my birthday in an erotic-asphyxiation scenario that shames me to revisit here.
This is the death of angst. Forget Nietzsche. Forget Sartre. Existentialism is dead. God has been resurrected, and people have a road map for attaining glorious immortality. In Boorism, everyone who’d abandoned religion now has a path by which to return to God, and that feels… great. Just look at their strolling, patient gaits. In light of this new salvation, mortal life feels like the final day of school.
It’s not the threat of Hell or jail or societal shunning that’s brought this bliss. It’s the complete assurance of paradise. It makes the inevitability of death shine like a final cosmic Friday preceding an infinite party weekend in Mazatlán.
As we wait in the jetway, Crescent says, “In Heaven the first thing I’m getting myself is a new liver. And a new body, and hair like I used to have.” Clutching his boarding pass, he says, “I swear, once I’m in Heaven I’m never touching drugs. Never again.”
“Amen,” a voice says. It’s a woman standing behind us in line. She’s shouldering a tote bag and thumbing the buttons of a PDA as she says, “In Heaven I’m eating steak and fries for every meal, and I’m still never weighing more than one hundred fifteen, maximum.”
“Amen,” says another voice waiting in line.
“In Heaven,” says another voice, farther back in the jetway, “I’m going to reestablish contact with my kids and give them the kind of father those good kids deserve.”
“Hallelujah!” someone shouts. Several “Praise bes” echo in the narrow jetway space. With that, everyone in line volunteers his or her aspirations for eternity.
“After I go to be with God, I’m going to finish high school.”
“My car in Heaven is going to be bigger than anything you’ve ever seen.”
“When I die, I’m asking for a dick bigger than your car!” someone spits.
Aboard the plane, in the first-class section, Crescent City finds our seats. He says, “You want the window or the aisle? I bought two tickets.” He waits as if for me to choose. “I’ll be right back,” he says, and goes up to the toilet.
I take the window. The flight attendant makes an announcement. “As we prepare for takeoff, please fasten your fucking seat belts and make sure your cocksucking seat backs are in the full upright and locked position….” The passengers laugh and applaud. Before the flight crew has finished its safety announcement, the familiar translucent form of Crescent City’s spirit comes walking back down the airplane aisle and takes the aisle seat next to mine. His body must be near overdosed on ketamine, still occupying the locked toilet cubicle.
Watery, clear like a prism, but suggesting every color in the spectrum, the ghost smiles at me and says, “I can’t wait to be an angel like you.” At the front of the cabin, the flight crew is knocking, soon pounding at the locked bathroom door. Oblivious, Crescent’s ghost asks me, “So, what was Heaven really like?”
DECEMBER 21, 8:43 A.M. EST
An Abomination Is Born
And what became of the latex thing-baby abandoned in the storm? In the account given by Solon, the Egyptian priests sang that the miniature idol will gradually come to be alive. Smeared with lipstick and chocolate, its body will circulate with the cooled seed expressed by a stranger.
And not for long does our soiled harbinger baby linger on the pink star beside Hollywood Boulevard, for the wind catches it and bears it a distance. The Greek statesman writes that the foul waters in the gutter collect and carry the babe. The tiny graven image, bloated with breath, faceless, it’s borne along in the company of drowned rats and bloated strays. These the gutters of Hollywood channel underground. And the subterranean sewers of Los Angeles guide the little idol and introduce it to wayward bleach bottles and spent ketchup bottles. The storm-water tunnels and the weirs manage this flood of plastic discards, this downward migration of polystyrene. And the thing-baby ventures forth on the flood, not in a basket woven of rushes, but attended to by legions of used syringes. And swaddled in dry-cleaning bags it journeys among this flotsam of toothless combs and escaped tennis balls. They all flock together, routed through buried pipes and sunless catch basins. Swimming here are the mysterious ghost shapes of blister-packaged objects, those plastic cauls of products long ago given birth by consumers. And thus becomes the fate of all worldly treasures. And in due time the little thing-baby and all these earthly rewards, the immortal leavings of mortal humans, these are poured into the ditch of the Los Angeles River.
The way turtle hatchlings are baited by the moon’s light, and each generation of salmon is compelled to find their destiny… so, too, will our thing-baby and its soiled host of man-made fragments be lured. A receding tide compels this entire generation of shapeless, useless castoffs to venture forth into the Pacific Ocean.
DECEMBER 21, 8:44 A.M. EST
A Sexual Predator in the Animal Kingdom