by James Frey
CONTENTS
MARIAANGELES
CHARLES
ALEXIS
ESTHER
RUTH
JEREMIAH
ADAM
MATTHEW
JOHN
LUKE
II MARIAANGELES
MARK
JUDITH
II ESTHER
PETER
III MARIAANGELES
THE FINAL TESTAMENT OF THE HOLY BIBLE
JAMES FREY
© James Frey 2011
The right of James Frey to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. Apart from any use permitted under UK copyright law no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Also by James Frey
A Million Little Pieces
My Friend Leonard
Bright Shiny Morning
He will come again
—The Apostles’ Creed
This book was written with the cooperation of and after extensive interviews with the family, friends, and followers of Ben Zion Avrohom, also known as Ben Jones, also known as the Prophet, also known as the Son, also known as the Messiah, also known as the Lord God.
MARIAANGELES
CHARLES
ALEXIS
ESTHER
RUTH
JEREMIAH
ADAM
MATTHEW
JOHN
LUKE
II MARIAANGELES
MARK
JUDITH
II ESTHER
PETER
III MARIAANGELES
MARIAANGELES
He wasn’t nothing special. Just a white boy. An ordinary white boy. Brown hair, brown eyes, medium height and medium weight. Just like ten or twenty or thirty million other white boys in America. Nothing special at all.
First time I saw him he was coming down the hallway. There was an apartment across the hall from where I lived that’d been empty for a year. Usually apartments in our project go quick. Government supports them so they’re cheap, for people who ain’t got shit in this world and, even though they always telling us different, know we ain’t ever gonna have shit. There’s lists for them. Long and getting longer. But nobody would live in that one. It had a reputation. The man who lived there before had gone crazy. He’d been normal. Sold souvenirs outside Yankee Stadium and had a wife and two little boys, real cute little boys. Then he started hearing voices and shit, started ranting about devils and demons and how he was the last man standing before us and the end. He lost his job and started wearing all white and trying to touch everybody on their head. He got his ass whooped a few times and his church told him to stop coming. He screamed at his family and played this organ music all night. Cursed the demons and pleaded to the Lord. Howled like some kind of dog. He didn’t ever let his family leave. We stopped hearing the music and it started smelling and Momma called the cops and they found him hanging from the shower. Wearing a white robe like a monk. Tied up with an electrical cord. They found his wife and boys with electrical tape around their ankles and wrists and plastic bags over their heads. There was a note that said we have gone to a better place. Maybe the Devil got him or the demons got him or his Lord left him. Or maybe he just got tired. And maybe they did go to a better place. I don’t know, and won’t probably ever know, not believing what I believe. And it didn’t matter anyway. Everybody heard about it and nobody would live there. Until Ben. He came down the hall with a backpack and an old suitcase and moved right in. He either didn’t know or didn’t care about what had happened before. Moved right the fuck in.
He was the only white boy in the building. Except for the Jews who owned the liquor stores and the clothing shops, he was the only white boy in the neighborhood. Rest of us was all Puerto Rican. A few Dominicans. A few regular old-school black motherfuckers. All poor. Angry. Wondering how to make it better and knowing there was no answer. It was what it was, is what it is. A fucked up ghetto in an American city. They’re all the fucking same. Ben didn’t seem to notice. Didn’t care he was out of place. He came and went. Didn’t talk to nobody. Wore some kind of uniform like a pretend cop during the week that made everybody laugh. Stayed in his apartment most of the time on weekends, except when he’d go out drinking. Then we’d see him passed out on the benches out front of the buildings, right near the playground. Or in the hallway with vomit on his shirt. One time he came stumbling home on a Sunday morning and his pants were all wet and he was trying to sing some twenty-year-old rap song at the top of his lungs. My brother and his friends started going along with him, making fun of him and shit, and he was too drunk to even know. We started thinking we knew why he was living among us. Why he didn’t care he was out of place, didn’t belong. We thought he must not be welcome where he came from anymore. They didn’t want him around. And we was right, he’d been kicked the fuck out by his people, we just had the reasons why wrong.
First time I talked to him was in the hallway. It was probably six months after he moved in and me and my daughter came walking out of our apartment on our way to chill in front of the building. He was standing there in his boxer shorts and a t-shirt with his door open, holding his telephone. My daughter was like a year and a half old. Just learning some words. She said hola and he didn’t say nothing back. She’s like her momma. I say something to someone, I expect they say something back. Everybody wants that. Some basic level of respect. Acknowledgment as a human being. So she said it again and he just stood there. So I said hola motherfucker, don’t you know how to be a decent motherfucking neighbor and say something back. And he looked nervous and sort of scared and said sorry. And then my girl said hola again, and he said it back to her and she smiled and hugged his leg and he laughed and I asked him what he was doing just standing there in the hallway with his drawers on and his door open and the phone in his hand. He said he was waiting for a new TV, that he had bought one on sale and it was being delivered. I told him he better have a good goddamn lock, that there’s motherfuckers around here that’d kill a motherfucker for a good TV, no lie. He just smiled, still seeming all nervous and scared, and said yeah, I think the lock is good, I’ll check and make sure. And that was that. We left him standing there. Waiting for a TV.
I know that damn TV came too, ’cause we started hearing it. Bang bang bang. Some explosions. Helicopters and airplanes flying around. Heard him whooping and hollering, saying yeah yeah yeah, gotcha you bastard, how you like me now, motherfucker, how you like me now. Could hear him pacing, walking around. Got a little scared ’cause he was sounding like the crazy man who killed his family and I started wondering if that place really was cursed. Made my brother, who dropped out of school the year before me and was still around then, go listen at the door. My brother got all serious and listened real close and turned to me and said this is bad, Mariaangeles, real bad, we got a honkey playing video games across the hall from us, I better round up some of my boys and take care of this shit. I laughed, and knew I shoulda knowed better. But that’s the way it is in this life, you love your own, and you don’t trust people who ain’t like you. If I’d a moved into a white neighborhood and one of my neighbors’d started hearing gunshots and hollering, there’d a been a fucking battalion of cops kicking my damn door in. That’s just the way it is.
My brother liked video games. He started spending all his time in that apartme
nt with Ben. They got a basketball game and a driving game where the more people they ran over with their car the more points they got. They started watching Knicks games and drinking beer together and sometimes smoking weed. I told my brother to be careful ’cause white people could be tricky, and you could never know what they might want. I thought everything in my life that had gone wrong had been because of white people, and most of ’em looked Jewish. My daddy got sent to prison by some when I was little. My momma had to work cleaning their houses most her life. My teachers, who all pretended to care so much but was really just scared of us and treated us like animals, was white people. They’re the cops, the judges, the landlords, the mayors, the people who run everything and own everything. And they aren’t letting go of any of it or sharing any of it. The rich take care of the rich and make sure they stay rich, and they talking about helping the poor, but if they really did, there wouldn’t be so many of us. And it was one thing having a white boy live across the hall and saying hi to him now and then or watching him get drunk or wear some silly uniform, but it’s another having my brother spending all his time with him. I didn’t think nothing good would come of it.
My brother didn’t ever listen to me. Never did. Wish he had, he might still be with us. This time, though, he was right and I was wrong. Even before he knew, before he became what he became, before it was revealed, Ben was okay. Nothing more, nothing less, just okay. I first found out when my brother took me over there. He had got tired of me telling him all the time that the white boy was no good, so one day he says you either come with me and see he’s cool or you shut the fuck up about me spending time over there. I ain’t one to shut the fuck up, only a few times in my whole life, so I went with him. We made sure Momma was okay and we went across the hall and we knocked on the door and he answered in his boxer shorts and t-shirt with tomato sauce all over it and my brother started talking.
What’s up, Ben.
Ben wiped some grease off his face and talked back at him.
What’s up, Alberto.
This is my sister Mariaangeles and her daughter Mercedes.
Yeah, I met them once.
Ben looked at me.
How you doing?
I gave him a dirty look.
You gonna invite us in?
I guess.
He opened the door. Stepped aside. And we went in and I started looking around. Big TV in the living room. A grubby old couch with cigarette burns that looked like it was made out of old carpet.
Video game disks and controllers. Kitchen was nasty. Pizza boxes. Empty cans of soup and pasta with spoons and forks still in ’em. Garbage bags filled on the floor. I opened the fridge ’cause I was thinking of having a soda or something and all it had in it was some ketchup and that was it. Whole place smelled like old food and stale beer. Went to the bedroom and there was a mattress and a pillow. Some clothes on the floor. Closet had his uniform hanging up in it, and it was the only thing that looked cared for. Bathroom, the bathroom where that man was hanging, was worse than the kitchen. Stains in the toilet and sink. Tissues overflowing out of a little garbage can. No toilet paper to be seen and I doubt he had ever cleaned it once. Even by the standards we was used to seeing, his place was bad. And more than bad, or nasty, or disgusting, it was just sad. Real sad. Like he didn’t know any better. Like he thought it was normal for a grown man to be living like that. Made me think he didn’t have nobody in his life that cared about him. Like he was all alone. Alone in a place where he didn’t belong because he didn’t have nowhere else to go, and no one else to go to. They’d have done something if they was around. But they weren’t. He was all alone. I went back into the living room. Bang bang bang. Him and Alberto shooting Nazis, throwing grenades at ’em. Mercedes sitting on the floor chewing her blankie, watching people explode on the TV. Too much. There’s enough ugliness in the world already without pretending to do more. Too much I said, and I smacked Alberto on the back of the head. He got all mad, said you knew what we was doing here, you didn’t have to come. I said play another game, play some game where you don’t gotta see blood squirting everywhere, and Ben said we’ll play the NBA game and changed the disk. While he doing it I ask him where he from, and he says Brooklyn, and I ask if he got family there, and he says yes. I ask him do he see them, he says no. I ask him why and he says I just don’t. I ask for how long and he says a long time. I ask him how old he is and he says thirty, I ask where he been living before this and he says he don’t want to talk about it. Answers made me sad. I always thought white people had good lives. Even the worst of ’em had it better off than me and everybody I knew. Just what I believed. But this boy didn’t have it better. Worse. Just him and his video games and his shitty apartment that no one else would live in. I had my girl and my family at least. He had it way worse.
Their game started back up and I didn’t like being there ’cause it was sad and depressing so I got Mercedes and we left and went back to our place. And that was it. For a long time. Six or nine months or something. Alberto played video games with Ben. I’d see him around. In his uniform if it was day, drunk if it was night, sometimes in the hall in his underwear while he was waiting for a pizza. I turned eighteen. Went out with some of my girlfriends from around the project and some girlfriends from when I was in school. They was all around my age, almost all of ’em in a situation similar to mine: no diploma, a kid or two and a couple had three, boyfriend still around but not really there, no way to get out or move up. Just ways to make it through the day or the week or the month. One of the girls was wearing nice clothes and a nice watch and smelled good like expensive perfume and she started saying she was working as a dancer and making plenty of money. Said you had to be eighteen, but could make three, four hundred, maybe five hundred bucks a night dancing in clubs. We started saying she was hooking but she said no, she danced naked on a stage and gave men lap dances in a private room and they gave her cash. That it was easy. Men from Manhattan would come up, tell their wives they had meetings or was working late, or they’d come over after baseball games at Yankee Stadium. They was stupid and it was easy to make ’em think they was getting some ass and the more you could make ’em think it the more they would pay you. She said it wasn’t a churchgoing job, rubbing her ass and tits all over white men, but none of us was churchgoing girls, and a good shower at the end of the night and she was fine with it, especially ’cause she was making so much money. She said maybe she was gonna leave the neighborhood. Find her a place where her kids would be able to go to a good school. Because even though almost all of us was dropouts, we knew the only way out for real was an education. Just none of us could do it.
Next day I called the girl. She took me to the club. I met the manager. Fat white man from Westchester. He made me strip down to my panties and bra and show him how I danced. Made me rub my ass on his crotch and rub my titties down his chest and whisper shit his wife wouldn’t say to him in his ear. His hands started wandering and I asked him what he was doing and he said he test drove all the girls before he let ’em out on the track. Made me sick. But we needed the money. Momma wasn’t working and who the fuck knew what Alberto did. Made me sick. But I let him. I let him do anything and everything. Took me for a test drive. Made me fucking sick.
Started working a few days later. It wasn’t hard but I had to close up part of my heart, part of my soul. I had been with three men before. One when I was twelve. Mercedes’ father, who I was with from when I was fourteen until he left when I was seventeen. The manager. Except for that manager, I’d waited. Tried to make sure they loved me. I know I loved them. Would have done anything for them. Killed for them or died for them. Hit the cross for them. I thought they felt the same, loved the same. But love is different for every person. For some it’s hate, for some it’s joy, for some it’s fear, for some it’s jealousy, for some it’s torture, for some it’s peace. For some it’s everything. For me. Everything. And to let a man touch me like that, or to touch a man like that, I had always ha
d to love. So I shut it down. Closed it. Buried it somewhere. And I danced and touched and whispered and got them hard and took them as far as I could and took them for as much as I could. They didn’t know but they took more from me. A shower at the end of the night wasn’t enough. Not even close. Didn’t clean nothing.
Three nights a week I worked, sometimes four. Started saving up. Got Mercedes some clothes that hadn’t been worn before, some of her own shoes, brand new. Got my momma a sweater, and new magazines every week. Didn’t put none of the money in a bank ’cause I know what happens with white people and their banks. I put it away. Where Alberto wouldn’t never look. Where nobody would look. A couple months, a couple more. Making money but hurting. And changing. Keeping myself closed and hard all the time started taking it out of me. One of the girls gave me some shit to smoke and it helped. So I did more of it. And it helped. More than a shower or anything else. But when it wore away it started hurting more so I was taking more. Sleeping and working and getting high. Starting to do things I would have never done before because I didn’t care, because I was hurting so much that more of the hurt wasn’t nothing. And it brought more money. One night I was working and Ben came in and one of the girls smiled and said look who’s here. And I asked her what about him and she said he was an easy mark. Would come in with his paycheck and get drunk and give the whole damn thing away. I told her he was living in my building and that he was mine. She got in my face about it for a minute till I told her how far I’d go. I was dipping into my money too much and I needed more. Momma was getting sick and Mercedes was getting sick and I needed them to get to a doctor and I didn’t have no insurance. And I needed more.
I went over to him. He was already drunk. He smiled and said hi and I said hey baby, nice seeing you here. And I didn’t even ask him. Took his hand. Led him to the room where we did the dances. And I went at him, giving him what all them men wanted and whispering in his ear about what we could do back at home now that I knew what kind of boy he was. I told him I wanted to suck his cock and I wanted him to fuck me, that I would ride his ass all day and all night, that I was getting all wet thinking about it. And I kept ordering drinks and feeding him. Just kept it going. And he took it. And was wanting more. And after an hour he was gone. His mind was gone and his money was gone. And I felt bad ’cause I knew what he was and I knew he wasn’t bad. Just sad. And alone. Man without anything or anyone, alone in that apartment where no one else would live, with his TV and his games and his pizza boxes and soup cans and his garbage and his sad mattress and his dirty bathroom. That’s all he was. He passed out. Right in the chair with my ass between his legs. The bouncers came and took him out. He didn’t have no ID or driver’s license or credit card. Nothing with his name or address or nothing. I told them he was my neighbor and I knew where he was living. They was gonna throw him on the street, in the gutter. Leave him there. Let whatever was gonna happen, happen. He’d been there before, I know. And shit had happened to him, I know that for sure. I told them I could at least get him back to the building. I had just taken everything he had and I was figuring I could do that much. We got a cab and put him sleeping in the backseat. I sat next to him. He was snoring like a baby. And when we got to the projects the driver helped me get him out of the cab. And I got him into the building and into the elevator. Got him into the hallway front of his door. And I left him there. And I went back out and got high. Spent some of his money on what I needed. And when I came home later he was still there.
