Live From Golgotha

by Gore Vidal

Saint always worked the circuit like there was no tomorrow, preaching, collecting money, and putting together what was, frankly, the greatest mailing list ever assembled by anyone in the Roman world. Saint had converts everywhere—-

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  donors, too. By the time we hit Rome, Saint had his own bank—of the Holy Ghost, he used to giggle, because, like the Ghost, you had to have faith before you could see where your money was. Saint also invented the numbered account as well as installment-paying. Although Moses is credited with the invention of double-entry bookkeeping. Saint developed so many new wrinkles in accounting that the Roman Internal Revenue Service was still trying to untangle them at the time of the fall of same, if that movie on the Late Show with Alec Guinness is to be trusted.

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  thin and carpeted with short black hairs like a spider's except for the big head, which was bald. All he had going for him was this beautiful speaking voice like the Sunday Hour of Power and Prayer man my wife's so taken with. And of course how Saint could lie! I've never known anyone who could make things up so quickly and so plausibly when he was really wired, and wired he was that night in Philippi, preaching to all those Brutus fans.

  After a series of truly inspired improvised anecdotes about Brutus, stories never heard before or since because Saint had never had the occasion to make them up before, he segues smoothly into his Road to Damascus routine, and I will say this: As often as I heard this particular rap—^ten thousand times.>—I never got tired of it. There was something God-given as we Greeks say—charismatic to you—^in Saint's delivery. Also the Yellow Brick Road story was never the same twice. I used to think that Saint's creative changes would be conftjsing to our flacks—^particularly John Mark, who has to keep feeding his processor with the "true" Jesus story, as opposed to Saint's recollections of Jesus, whom he never met except as a sort of ghost on the road to Damascus, but John Mark says that all the different versions are actually very helpftil to him as he puts together the True Story of the Good News that Jesus brought the world about the end of the world, to be later added to by Saint ("Call me Sol") Paul in his correspondence to yours truly, Timothy, among others. But John Mark—or Saint Mark as he'll be promoted to unless the TV people are giving me the runaround—says that Saint's stories don't have to make sense because he, John Mark, is redoing the whole story anyway.

  I wonder if Chet has got in touch with John Mark, who is still alive I'm told, not that that makes any difference if we're all on tapes and Chet can just do a fast rewind to where

  Mark is alive and writing his Gospel, a Gospel which in the time of Chet—^way in the future—is being erased by the Hacker—has been erased? I cannot get used to the tenses now that time has been reduced to a round black plate. Where am I? Am 1> Where was I? Where will I be when the glory comes?

  I should note here that everyone connected with this circus has his own axe to grind, which is why I am now about to grind mine. I think that suppressing Jesus's weight problem has given us a highly distorted view of His psychology, which was itself distorted—^if not downright peculiar. There are also a number of aspects of His mission to the soon-to-be late great planet Earth that have been completely omitted by Mark and the others. There is also the Great Embarrassment. Despite His promise, Jesus has not only not come back now, but He has yet to make His return during the two thousand dismal years that separate me from Chet. I don't know how you can keep the Message alive without an Estimated Time of Arrival. It is possible that Judgment Day has come and gone, but surely Chet would have mentioned it. I mean someone would have had to notice it, wouldn't they?

  Saint's Philippi version of how he was converted to Christianity, which he hadn't yet invented, was particularly vivid as he described seeing the ghost of our founder on the castbound Jerusalem-Damascus freeway. "I had been a persecutor, my friends. Yea! Of Brutus. Nay! I mean of Jesus. But then is not each the same in that he was persecuted for his love of slaves and slavery?" Saint could make even a slip of the tongue become like a clashing single cymbal.

  "I had been hired by Mossad, the dreaded secret service apparatus of the Roman Palestinian Lobby. I had been ordered to spy on—and then denounce—all those who wished to make their peace with God who had sent them His only

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  Son—the only Daughter is for Judgment Day—to show mankind the road to Heaven. So there I was. A hot day. Palm trees. A mirage shivering in the middle distance. A camel. A pyramid. Your average Middle Eastern landscape as viewed from the freeway. Complete with burning bush. Suddenly. HE. WAS. THERE."

  In that silent smoky hall you could have heard an unweighted pin drop or the loosest fr)reskin slide back. "Wide as He was tall, Jesus waddled toward me." To live audiences, Saint often let this sort of detail slip out. But in his writing, never. "That face. Those luminous eyes hidden somewhere in all that golden fat. The ineffable smile like the first slice from a honeydew melon. Oh, delight! He held up a hand, a tiny starfish cunningly fashioned of lard. He spoke. His voice so high, so shrill that only the odd canine ever got the whole message, hence the need for interpretation and self-consciousness—in short, mega-fiction." Saint could make even literary theory sing when he wanted to, and he wanted to that night at Philippi.

  " 'Why,' shrilled the Son of the One God, 'dost thou persecuteth me-th.>' " Saint always went ye-olde whenever he quoted Our Savior—but savior from what.> This has never occured to me before, and I'm a bishop. Sin, I suppose. But we've all given up on that, if the truth be known. Certainly Jesus wasn't going to save us from Judgment Day or from Hell either since He Himself is an integral part of the Whole Judicial Process. I suppose He intends to get His friends and fund-raisers off. One day I must give some real thought to this particular aspect of Christianity. Like who is saving whom from what.>

  Anyway, the folks ate up the ye-olde stuff. They also liked the fact that Our Savior, at least according to Saint, never said anything that your Aunt Minerva wouldn't have

  said. They also liked it when Saint dressed up the act a bit, throwing in miracles galore.

  It is no secret that folks everywhere like miracles, and this has certainly been the age of them. Naturally, we saints have been known to rig the occasional miracle, like raising from the dead someone who's actually alive but painted green and so forth. On the other hand, what could be more miraculous than Chet's recent visit to me or all those other strange types who've been monitoring us over the years.^

  The first creepy visitor that I ever saw— knew that I saw, of course—^was that night at Philippi. I also know now, if I did not know then, that Saint had many more dealings with these "angels in disguise," as he called them, than he ever let on. Who are they? Or, to be precise, who are you>

  I shall be frank. I am convinced that every last one of them—or you—^you too, Chet—^is out to secure, on the most favorable terms possible, commercial franchises to our product, which means getting in on the ground floor of this definitely upmarket growth-oriented religion we've been constructing on the absolutely true word of the One God in the three sections, each suitable for worship in part or as a whole and absolutely guaranteed (or your money back) to dress up any residence or soul tastefully. So now you readers or audiovisual sightseers know that I am on to you at last, which I wasn't that first night at Philippi.

  Only once did Saint open up on the subject and that was a few years after Philippi when we were in Rome, where he was busy seeing lawyers, and I was shacked up with a rich widow called Flavia on the Aventine.

  We were at breakfast. In a loggia. View of bright muddy Tiber. View of cemetery across Tiber. Tiber full of barges being pulled upstream. By slaves. By oxen. Sun like a round hot . . . thing. In the sky. Blue sky.

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  Blue. Saint started in on how blue he was and how unhappy his life had been and how, worst of all, he was a phony because he'd never bothered to meet Jesus before He died. "There I was in Tarsus. Practically next door to Jerusalem. People would say
. Want to see Jesus? I'd say, 'You got to be kidding. Who's got the time.> I'm busy.' Well, I was busy putting out a line of ready-made tents, but what really kept my nose to the grindstone was my undercover work for Mossad. I was one of their numerous hit men. Call me Sol. My code name. Remember Stephen, the self-hating Jew? The one who said the law of Moses is coming to an end because our boy J.C. is the messiah.^ 'Sol baby,' said Mossad, 'hit this pigeon.' And I did. Wth rocks yet. We got him like we got Count Bemadotte on the fast forward. Pow! Then I got this order to keep an eye on the most subversive self-hating Jew of them all, Fat Jesus. But did I? No. Too boring, I thought. Just another loser, I thought. And a glandular case to boot. Then He meets me on the freeway after He died. Oh, I could kick myself! I mean when He was alive just about everybody and his brother in Greater Israel had heard and seen Him. In fact, it is my personal educated guess that, so far, to date, in this frame of time, more than one million have personally checked Him out and that's just a fraction of all those outside our present frame who'll keep on coming and coming, wanting tickets—cost no object—for the Crucifixion scene at Golgotha, which is the grand finale in every version—and yet / was never there, to date, that is."

  My head was spinning. "There aren't a million people in Greater Jerusalem even if you were to count the Arabs, which nobody does."

  Saint batted his eyelids at me, an old trick when he was about to lie or change the subject. But I didn't let up. I kept at him until finally he said, "Well, I meant. . . you know, the

  kibitzers. The monitors from the future like the one we saw that night at Philippi. Remember her?"

  I did. I do.

  Saint was in the middle of his Road to Damascus number, playing that Macedon audience like a twelve-string lute in the hands of a love-mad Lesbian Islander.

  "The hand, the handV he cried, eyes shut with recollected awe. "In the center of the palm there was this hole where He had been tacked to the cross by a nail. This was the proof. The proof positive that it was HIM—HE." Saint always adjusted his grammar to the audience and never the audience to the grammar. But then we saints are bom knowing the tricks of the trade except that Saint had one trick that nobody else has ever mastered. When we have to go into all that endless rap about how J.C. is descended from King David and so on, the result is not only deeply boring but absolutely mystifying for a Gentile audience that doesn't know the difference between a Jew and a Chinaman. So how did Saint get through the dull parts.> He invented, all by himself, with no professional£[uidance of any kind, tap dancing.

  Saint had copper cleats attached to the soles of his sandals. Then when he started with the "begats," he would start dancing, back and forth across the stage, the taps preceding and succeeding each "begat" and then, grand finale, a tap between the "be" and the "gat" until by the time he gets past the begats Abendigo to HIM, he's like a simian bowlegged Astaire who my wife adores on the TV. Personally, I wouldn't put Saint in Astaire's class, but he was certainly every bit as good as Dan Dailey, which is high praise.

  Well, Saint had those Macedon yokels clapping their hands and tapping their toes as he gave out with the Message, Hallelujah! "The form of this world is a-changin'. It's all

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  a-gonna end real soon. Them's who worship false gods is in for eternal torment. But us'n'll be saved. And that's a promise. Ifn you follow Him. 'Cause with Him—He-Hi-Ho!— the law of Moses got itself crossed out. Crossed out! Get it? That's the Good News, folks!"

  Usually Saint didn't do Moses-bashing with the goyim on the ground that they wouldn't know what he was talking about, but on that hot muggy night in Philippi he was truly inspired, like a drunk spider spinning a wild web in which every yokel present was a fly trapped.

  By the time he got to the "And now a pair of young brothers in the Lord will pass among you with their collection plates and some literature which is absolutely gratis for an obol" ending, I knew that we had started up yet another church because that's how we did it back then. First a hellfire sermon from Saint. Then the collection. Then names and addresses for our master Holy Rolodex while Saint would take appointments for baptisms and so on. Finally, before skipping town, he'd appoint some deacons and deaconesses and lo! and behold the First Pauline Church of Philippi would open its doors for business.

  As Silas and I made our way through that revved-up crowd, accepting donations with the faraway smile Saint had taught us, I noticed a strange litde woman, wearing a black costume that I did not recognize at the time. Of course since Chet's arrival at my bungalow with the television, I've learned a lot about the different costumes in the TV part of the world. But in those days everybody in our part of the world just wore his tunic and maybe his cloak or toga on top of that and that was about it for the guys. The gals wore wraparounds. Anyway, this particular lady in the black non-wraparound was my very first "angel in disguise."

  Saint, Silas, and I were at the back of the hall behind the

  Stage with no one around and only a couple of smoky torches for light. Silas and I were busy counting the money while Saint was copying out names to put in the Holy Rolodex.

  Suddenly, the strange little woman reappeared and clutched at Saint's arm. "I saw you at Lystra." She had no accent at all, to my ear anyway. Yet she was certainly not Greek. "I saw you heal the man with the crippled foot."

  "I know." Saint was very calm. "I saw you, too. Sit down, madam. Timmy, give her your seat."

  "I'll stand." She stared at Saint, eyes like inflamed egg yolks. "Wherever you heal with faith, there I am. Or try to be. It isn't always easy to get through."

  "Where there's a wall there's a way—as He said." Saint's lack of curiosity about who she was—not to mention from where—should have clued me in that he was on to what I came to think of as the phantom phony folks. After Philippi, there were to be a lot of them, particularly on important occasions.

  "Do you not agree with me. Saint Paul, that illness is simply a manifestation of a weakening of mind?"

  "All things are contained within the single mind of the One True God in His three aspects." Saint could dispense this sort of smooth bullshit while taking apart and reassembling a complex Holy Rolodex machine, which is exacdy what he was doing. He was a lousy tentmaker but when it came to any office equipment that involved paying customers, he had digital dexterity in spades.

  "I study you every chance I get," she said. "Which is not as often as I'd like because I must make myself ill first, which goes against my whole nature, a perversion, really, of mind itself. But I have no choice. That is why I deliberately gorge on Welsh rarebit, which I detest. Then I sleep and dream horrid dreams of olden times filled with hideous peo-

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  pie and ghastly smells." She was staring with revulsion at Saint's tunic. Time to bum it, I duly noted.

  "Then suddenly I am in the Holy Land, where I behold you in the act of healing through Right Thinking, and it is worth the rumbling bowels, the acid indigestion, the horrendous hangover next day because, in addition to Welsh rarebit, let me confess that I imbibe gin neat or even, sometimes, as now, a gin daisy, a tasty cocktail if one were not, as I am, temperance."

  "So, drunk out of your skull, madam, you are transported to me, here in the olden, golden times. I am flattered. What is a gin daisy?"

  "Three parts gin to one part Cointreau, and a maraschino cherry. Oh, it is vile."

  Apparently, the drunken lady in black had seen Our Lord only the one time when He raised Lazarus from the dead. "I had to be there for that caper because it proved my point perfectly: Lazarus was not dead because there is no death. As death is bad and God is good, and if God is everything and everything is God, then death—^which is not good but bad—cannot exist." Well, I've heard dumber arguments, and in our own church, too.

  "Madam, Lazarus was dead as a mackerel." Saint was smooth, fingers busy with the Holy Rolodex.

  "No. He may have looked to you like the proverbial mackerel but that was only his appearance. There is, of cou
rse, the appearance of death as there is the appearance of evil but these appearances are inside the viewer when he has been thinking wrong thoughts, negative thoughts, though they don't exist outside, where God ..."

  "Three parts of gin to one of vermouth.^"

  "Cointreau. I'm getting a headache now, and I'll soon be taking the channel boat home. So I must be quick. I had

  no time at Lystra to ask you if you don't agree that it's all in the mind? Bad living, bad thoughts, death, illness . . ."

  "Mind is God. God is mind, of course, dear lady, of course. But to be mackerel-defunct is the exact opposite of being merry-grig funct and so . . ."

  The lady clapped her hands, eyes aswim with tears. "You agree! I knew you would. I've based so much of my work in the lab on this higher knowledge that I am now eager for your personal scientific validation. You see, I am, through God, a scientific healer not of souls but of minds. I am, I like to think, as stricdy scientific in my approach as He was that day with the mackerel named Lazarus. How radiant He was! Slender but strong. He placed His hand on Lazarus's brow. . . ."

  "Slender.> Our Lord.> I fear He was very fat. You mistook one of the disciples for Him."

  "But He was thin. ..." She gasped. "You mean Jesus was the other one.> The . . . fat one.>"

  "Yeah," said Saint.

  She looked crushed. "I am heartbroken! To think that the first of all doctors and healers could not heal Himselfl Fat as a butterball. He was. Bad color. Short of breath too. I noticed that. Naturally He was obliged to live as a human being. But why did He have to stuff Himself v^th codfish cakes and scrod.> Boiled beef, baked beans, Indian pudding.>"

  "Dishes not native to Palestine, I fear . . ."

  "Scrapple. Whatever . . ."

  "Halvah was a weakness of Our Lord, according to tradition. A kilo of mashed beans with olive oil was also a favorite—usually as a pre-sermon snack. Give Him the carbohydrates and He'd let the proteins go. Naturally, He was a martyr to flatulence. Even after He was dead when we met on the—"