Live From Golgotha

by Gore Vidal

  This book made available by the Internet Archive.

  Live from Golgotha

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  morning, noon, and night. But the Jews in Jerusalem—like the oily James, kid-brother-of-Our-Lord, and Peter, known as "The Rock" because of the absolute thickness of his head—finally accepted Saint's notion that although the Gentiles were unclean, Jesus was probably too big an enterprise for just the one tribe, and so they allowed Paul to take the Message—"the good news," as we call it—^to the Gentiles. Thanks largely to Saint's persuasive preaching and inspired fund-raising, a lot of Gentiles couldn't wait to convert, like my father, George the Greek.

  So Saint went sashaying around Asia Minor, setting up churches and generally putting on a great show, aided by the cousins Bamaby and John Mark. But although the Jerusalem Jews liked the money that Saint kept sending back to headquarters, they still couldn't, in their heart of hearts, stomach the Gentiles, and so they refiised to eat at the same table with us, since our huge uncut cocks were always on their minds. Finally, things came to a head when Saint took a shine to a young convert and stud named Titus and took him down to Jerusalem for a long weekend of fun. After having drunk too much Babylonian beer, Titus took a leak up against the wall of Fort Antonia, where the Roman troops were stationed. As luck would have it, his snakelike foreskin was duly noted with horror by some loitering Jews, who reported to the rabbinate the presence of a Gentile on the premises a stone's throw fi-om the Temple. The central office then leaned on James, an employee of the Temple, and James told Saint that in the future those goyim who became converted to Jesus must be circumcised. That tore it.

  When Saint threatened, there and then, to retire as aposde and fund-raiser, the subject was dropped by the Jerusalem Christians—or Jesists, as they liked to be called— because they were now hooked on the revenues from Asia

  Minor. Even so, they still kept the heat on Saint personally to show that he had his heart in the right, or kosher, place.

  Finally, Saint suggested to John Mark that he undergo a public circumcision in order to convince Jerusalem that Saint was in no way an apostate or self-hating Jew. John Mark split, leaving an opening not only in Saint's office staff but sack, too. As an all-Greek Greek boy who wanted to see the world, I figured that Saint's fussing around with my bod was a small price to pay, or so I thought when I signed on. It wasn't as if there wasn't plenty of me left over for the girls of Lystra. Also, as secretary and gofer, I was pretty good, if not in John Mark's league. The work was never dull. And what a learning experience!

  Then came the shock. Saint was denounced by the pillars of the church in Jerusalem: He ate with goyim. He christened goyim. He was having carnal knowledge of a teenage Greek with two centimeters of rose-velvety foreskin, me. This last was only whispered, but it would have been quite enough to get Saint stoned to death by a quorum of Jews anywhere on earth if James were to give the word.

  That explains why I am in the nightmare that I can never get out of once it starts. Only this last time when I dreamed it, something unusual happened just before I woke up.

  The dream's always the same. I am on my back. The room is chilly. I have goose bumps. All around me are Jews, wearing funny hats. Saint stands beside the table, my joint resting lighdy in his hand. Needless to say, between the cold and the approaching mutilation, my fabled weenie has shrunk considerably.

  "Let it be reported by all who presendy bear witness that Timothy, our youthful brother in Christ, has now, of his own fi-ee will, undertaken to join the elect of the elect through the act of circumcision."

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  At this point I shut my eyes in the dream, an odd thing to do, since a dreamer's eyes are shut to begin with, but then dreams have their own funny laws. Anyway, I can no longer see Saint's huge staring black eyes set in that round bald head with its fringe of dyed black curls, but I can hear Saint's deep voice as he says, "Mohel, do thy business!"

  A rough hand seizes my organ of generation. I feel a sharp pull. Then a burning, the knife ... I scream, and wake up.

  But last night I did not wake up as I always do at this point in the dream. Instead, cock afire, voices mumbling all round me in the dark, I had the sense that something was really going wrong. For one thing, I was not back in my bed in the bishop's bungalow here in Thessalonika where I am bishop of all Macedonia as well as sometime titular bishop of Ephesus. I was still lying on the kitchen table in my family's house in Lystra. I slowly open my eyes. Salt tears bum the Hds.

  The room is empty now. I look down at my naked body—^my teenage body, which means I am still in the dream. My aching joint is swathed in linen like an Egyptian mummy. I am sweating like a horse. I sit up. I swing my legs over the table. I am dizzy. Where is everybody.>

  Saint is suddenly beside me. "Timmy"—^he bats his eyes at me—"how do you feel?"

  "Awful," I say. "Why hasn't the dream ended, like it's supposed to?"

  "Dream?" He pretends not to know that we're in a dream. He acts as if now—my now in Thessalonika—^is really and truly then in Lystra, our common memories unmediated by sleep and time and all the rest, and I am just coming to, per usual, on the kitchen table.

  Carefully, I swing my legs back and forth, aware of the

  dull ache at the center of my everything. On the window sill, my mother, Eunice, has left the half-skinned remains of a rabbit, a nice touch dream-wise. Flies are devouring the rabbit. Eunice is terrible in the kitchen. I feel sick.

  Sitting on the edge of the table, I am as mad as I must have been back then at what had been done to me just so Saint could stay in good with the Jerusalem pillars of salt of the church. Historically, as well as theologically, he should have made a clean break with the Jews then and there, using the preservation of my perfect dong as a perfect pretext. Then he should have preached only to the goyim. But I'm afraid that all those years working as a secret agent for Mossad had made Saint even more devious than the Big Fella in the sky had made him in the first place.

  "Well, yes, honey bun, this is a dream, natch." Whenever Saint sounds as if he's just gargled in chicken fat, I am immediately on guard. Even at fifteen I knew I was dealing with a con man. "A recurring dream, to be precise ..."

  "No." I am nasty. "It is a recurring nightmare. . . ."

  Since Saint's eyebrows meet in a straight line when he fi-owns, one black ftirry eyebrow seems to be humping the other like a couple of black caterpillars. I must write that down in the book of similes that I am keeping since succumbing to the lure of authorship in first-century a.d. vernacular Greek.

  Saint frowns. Caterpillars make love. "Now, Timmy dearest, all of this happened long ago, though it seems like it was only moments ago that you were cut up for God. ..." Aware he is off and running in the wrong direction, Saint changes course; he poses saintlike before the window. "I am dead and gone to glory." Black transcendent gaze is aimed at dead rabbit.

  "When this is a nightmare, yes, you are long since dead.

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  and the nightmare is supposed to end when I wake up in my bed, with Atalanta, my better half. ..."

  "Hallelujah!" Saint cries. "This is no nightmare, Timmy! We're in the big league now. This is a vision. There has been a dispensation. At last I've been allowed to channel into your recurring nightmare, darling boy, to see how you are—^in the pink, obviously, in your rosy teenage succulent pink." He reaches for my right titty. I slap his hand. As a stud, I never had the slightest gender confusion. Anyway, Saint's hand turns out to be just air, though in the nightmare proper it is real enough. Something's going wrong, all right.

  "I think I'm going to wake up." I begin to hear Ata-lanta's heavy breathing beside me in the bed where the nightmare—or vision—^is taking place.

/>   "First, a message from our sponsor." Saint is sonorous. "From God in the three sections. Timmy, these are the times that are about to try your soul. Yes, I am now in Heaven on the left-hand side of God, about twenty souls from The Elbow. But I am also, simultaneously, back here in your recurring nightmare—now promoted to vision—^with a message. ... A message," he repeats. He seems to be programmed, and I ponder for a moment if this is really Saint and not some sort of diabolic vision.

  "So what's the message.^" The sight of the dead rabbit and all the flies is making me really sick.

  "There has been a systematic erasure of the Good News as recorded in the New Testament, which John Mark and the others so carefully assembled in order to record once and for all the Greatest Story Ever Told that was told but now is being untold thanks to this virus which has attacked the memory banks of every computer on earth as well as in Heaven and limbo, too. We know that it is the work of a single cyberpunk, or Hacker, as he will be known in the

  future, but why and how Satan has so disposed this man or woman to eliminate the Gospels—my own special good news, too—is a mystery as of this dream."

  For me, this was, literally, nonsense. "I hear you. Saint. But I don't understand a word you're saying. I mean, what^s being erased. Let's start with that, OK>"

  "The story of Our Lord Jesus Christ as told in the three Synoptic Gospels as well as by that creep John." Saint never liked John, who was very much a part of the Jerusalem crowd and close to James.

  "How do you 'erase' all those books.^" I ask, wondering, first, what's a computer.^ second, a memory bank.> third, a virus.^

  "This is how." Saint's noncorporeal hand appears to seize my throbbing linen-swathed joint. "Suppose I had channeled in an hour ago, and suppose I had stopped the mohel from circumcising you in what is, for the purposes of the nightmare, your fifteenth year, which always occurs in the fiftieth year since the birth of Our Lord at Las Vegas ..."

  ''Where?''

  "At Bethlehem, state of Israel. I misspoke, I fear."

  Saint starts to gabble, always a sign he's up to something. Glossolalia—speaking in tongues—^was very big back then, particularly when you had nothing to say. "During this vision, I could easily have stopped the circumcision, thus changing my relationship with the Jews and the Greatest Story Now Being Untold. If your foreskin had not been cut off, they would have cut me off, as of 50 a.d., and then there would have been no Christian story worth telling, no Crusades, Lourdes, Oral Roberts, Wojtyla. But let us not get sidetracked into what mi£fht have been when we are stuck with what is happening this very minute in the future. The Gospels are being garbled, those that haven't already van-

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  ished, like John Mark's, a wonderful secretary, I still say, loyal as I am to you, with those glorious buns ..."

  "Shut up, Saint!" I am simultaneously both fifteen-year-old village lout and aging bishop in the midst of a vision-nightmare. "Why is the Hacker garbling the texts and, even if he does, how can all those books vanish.^"

  "The why is as unclear as the who. But there is now chaos in the Christian message. Just now, when I misspoke, I was repeating the latest Hacker-inspired blasphemy about Our L>ord's birth in Las Vegas, and about his connection with the mob to which former Nevada Senator Laxalt does not— repeat not —belong only ..."

  I am getting a headache. My loins throb. I stand up. My head swims, and the kitchen seems to be going round.

  "I'm losing you!" Saint cries. "Before you fade to black, and I to light, remember this: Tou must now tell the Greatest Story Ever to Be Told—by you, alone—^Timothy, disciple of me. Saint Paul, and yourself titular bishop of Ephesus and de facto bishop of Macedonia, to be martyred in the reign of President Bush, I mean the emperor Domitian— or was it Nerva.>—^when Greater Israel is in flames. . . . Write it all down, Timmy, because you are the only witness that the virus cannot get to. You are immune, which means that long after Matt, Mark, Lu-lu, and John-John are just folk memories, there will be only one absolutely true gospel, and that will be according to Saint Timothy! You're all we've got, darling. Because everything written about Our Lord before 96 A.D.—^you'll die, my angel, in 97—^has been erased or distorted by the computer virus that rushes, nay, implodes the channels of human memory like the myriad photons of Satan, losing quarks to Hell and, worse, to the ultimate black star, that counterforce where all is mirror-reverse and the unknown Hacker at work in the computer is Satan, and

  Satan's God and you me, Yummy you, Tummy, Timmy, Me . . . Beware Marvin Wasserstein of General Electric."

  During this dreadful spiel, I slowly dissolved out of that kitchen of nearly a half century ago and into my own bed where Atalanta, my helpmeet, has met me, post-nightmare, so many times now in the course of a quarter century of warm mature Christian marriage between two equal-in-Christ, if not in bed, human beings.

  I opened my eyes. Atalanta was standing over me, a dishrag in her hand, which she prompdy mopped my face with. "You were having a nightmare," she announced. "The usual?"

  Heart racing, I took the rag from her and dried the cold sweat from my neck. "The usual," I said. "Only this time Saint came to me in the dream, at the end. ..."

  "How was he.>" Atalanta had already lost interest in my nightmare. She was now at the window, looking down on the back courtyard where the maid was hanging up the laundry. Another bright clear day in Macedonia.

  "He's put on weight." As usual when I dream of my mutilation, I was aroused. In the old days, I would fall upon my helpmeet, but now I save what is left of my once extraordinary potency for ftm and games at the New Star Baths, which, as bishop, I have vowed to shut down as a center of impurity. Happily, our proconsul has shares in the syndicate that owns all the baths in Thessalonika and so, once again, Caesar and Christ must accommodate each other, and I go regularly to the baths for the steam and of course the concerts in season. "He says I am to write down everything because all the Gospels have been destroyed except mine, which isn't written yet."

  "Praise God!" Atalanta never listens but then she is, like

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  me, a natural blonde. Of course, she hears cvcrythmg. "How were they all destroyed?"

  "A computer virus."

  "Oh, yes." Atalanta looked sad. "Yes. I've always been afraid that would happen. Some hacker, just for fun, no doubt, has punched his way into the memory banks and typed out all the secret code numbers and then—presto! no more tapes, Jesus, us. We are such stuff as fax are made on and our little tapes are rounded with a thermal sleep due to Cascade or Fish 6."

  "You are talking in tongues again." But, as I always do when she does, I wrote down, phonetically, the strange words that she had just said.

  Lately, Atalanta seems not to know whether or not she has left the everyday world for some waking dream of her own. When I have my nonsense visions—^if they are nonsense—Fm asleep, as I was just now with Saint. But, wide awake and out of nowhere, Atalanta suddenly talks of computer viruses as if she knew what they ^yere.

  Now that I am at my desk in the upstairs rumpus room, and Atalanta is off preparing her celebrity auction at the proconsul's palace, I shall follow Saint's advice and begin the Gospel According to Myself with, as we usually do, the Word, after first recording last night's nightmare and this morning's weird message from Atalanta, the house glossolal-ist.

  I shall put in Jesus's genealogy later. Although many gospel writers like to begin with His family, I have always thought genealogy a great bore even when it's one's own. Saint only threw it in because the Jews liked knowing that Jesus came from one of their better families, but, as I once pointed out to Saint, if He really came from God then He wasn't related to anybody human except maybe His mother's

  extended family. Saint finessed that by saying Jesus was related to everyone human as we are all in God's image since we are His children and so on and so forth.

  Anyway, I shall skip the begats—^Mark did, and his book is far more popular than Matthew's ![ Publ
ishers Weekly in Alexandria is to be trusted. Actually, sales figures are often rigged by rival Christian publishing firms. For instance . . .

  "The men have arrived with the television set." Those were the exact words that the maid said to me as I was sitting at this desk, about to describe Saint Paul's first meeting with our Lord on the eastbound Jerusalem-Damascus fi*eeway.

  CNN financial news report, and what appears to be the usual ongoing bad news for the dollar. "The set is now working on a battery. Guaranteed for one thousand hours of constant viewing pleasure." Then, very simply, they vanished.

  For a week now, I've been unable to stop watching television. Like a madman, I swdtch from channel to channel. I cannot get enough of the astonishing electronic world of the future as glimpsed through that small black window. The sickening yellows and the atrocious pulsing reds are like a never-ending, always-changing yet ever-the-same nightmare. I can now say, in life, that I have gazed on Hell, and it is even busier than one had feared.

  Atalanta is less hooked on the Sony than I, but she is very partial to Twentieth Century—^twenty centuries have gone by since now!—Fox musical comedies, as well as to the Sunday Hour of Power and Prayer program where a sort of Christianity is preached by a painted man with false hair, and choir.

  For some reason, only we can see or hear anything on the set. When we ask visitors to our home if they can see pictures on the tube, they look surprised, and congratulate us on what they take to be a particularly valuable chunk of obsidian, polished to a high gloss.

  Since I assume that Saint is behind all this, I do my best to make sense of these weird reports from close to two thousand years in the future—everything seems to be dated from the year of the birth of Jesus, a dicey business since it is well known that Our Lord was constandy knocking years off His age in order to appear youthful and with-it.