One Hit Wonders

by Patrick Warner

  Strangely, the facts (sordid as they were) were easier to deal with than the sudden and severe change in Lila’s disposition. Far more alienating was the figure Lila became, literally overnight. Gone was Mistress Lila and in her place, the Reverend Mother Lila, the Moon Child Lila. The moody, capricious woman I loved was replaced by an even-tempered, conservative housewife. A sample page from her diary during this period tells it all. Note that I feel no reservation about publishing this excerpt because Lila, as revealed in this entry, is pure fiction, some kind of alien.

  “I feel like a child starting this little book. It is intended simply as a diary of my everyday internal/external existence/ non-existence. I have decided to keep a record of my life because for the first time in many years I believe that my life is worth recording. What happened was a revolution/ revelation to me. To have finally accepted the existence of God and of Jesus Christ as the Word made flesh. This has gone right to the core of my being. The place in me that was so troubled and sick for so many years—the place I now recognize as soul—has been put back on the road to recovery. The reality of Jesus Christ is way beyond my comprehension. Still, I believe that I have had glimpses and the joyful feeling that has accompanied these spiritual insights has left me awestruck. At the same time I have also had dark days. The only way I can understand these is to think about them as a spiritual grieving for what is not (what is made absent by sin), as joy is the spiritual celebration of what is (made present by love).

  Having considered for many years that my internal life is my real life, the revelation of the spiritual life as the structure around and through which the inner life must revolve and develop, is an incredible comfort and also a challenge. Most brilliant of all is that there is an IS, a metaphysical reality and a moral structure to the universe. To know that there is a right and wrong and to have even the most infantile notion of what they are, is grace—and so odd that it should be considered so.

  One of the harder parts of my spiritual awakening has been how to deal with friends. Conversations about God always seem to be acceptable only if dressed up in the clothes of a natural/nature spirituality. Any mention of traditional religion or faith is met with embarrassment or scorn or a mixture of both. Freddy and I have been shy about discussing these matters with others. My reluctance distresses me because I understand it comes from fear of rejection as much as it comes from my inability to express what I want to express (how to explain my vision). I should pray for the right words and for poise in the face of intolerance.

  It has been hard for Freddy. After all, he is only coming to Jesus through my experience. And he is trying, really trying. He has stood by me all the way. I now know for sure—if I ever doubted it (and I did)—that he really loves me. But I want him to know Jesus. He says he is giving it a shot. I encourage him to see past the rules and dogma and to form a personal relationship with Our Lord and Saviour. I will pray for him.”

  I did give it a shot. I read the literature, listened to her for countless hours as she tried to articulate her spiritual insights. She was in rehab—Catholic rehab, with Sister Shannie—and doing well; I didn’t want to do anything to discourage her. Still, it chafed. The bit that hurt most was this business about her personal relationship with Jesus. The way she talked about talking to him, about being with him, the strange beatific look that came over her, as though…Well, there is no delicate way to say it—you can call it ecstasy, but it looked post-coital, post-orgasmic. I was no more in the picture than I had been when she had been all coked-up and bonking Al Calhoun. But in those early post-confession days, I was still hopeful I would get my old Lila back. I was not prepared to admit she was slipping away. So I played along.

  One Sunday, I asked Jesus if he would come with me on my first ever outing to a big-box store. He asked me why I wanted to go there. I said I didn’t want to go at all, but going there would be a spiritual exercise: it was about helping others. I told him my publisher had released a new paperback edition of Serge Protector—this one with an introduction by Noam Chomsky—and she wanted me to do book signings at big-box stores across the country. I told her I would start locally and see how it went. Normally, I would have told her to go to hell—Jesus laughed at that—but this time it played into my plans. I told Jesus I was trying to reinvent myself and my life with Lila. We’d had some trouble—with a capital T—and needed to start over. Part one of that process was our plan to move to a new neighbourhood. Part two was about becoming more outward looking, more engaged with the community. Also, I told Jesus, since he was now Lila’s best friend, I owed it to her to get to know him better. He patted me on the hand, gave me the basset-hound stare, as if to say: Freddy, I hear ya.

  The parking lot of the big-box store was thronged with minivans. My mind was jittery—once you open certain doors you start to see that almost anything is admissible, and I was afraid of what might be coming next. I tried to keep it light. Look, I said to Jesus, can’t you imagine all of these minivans dressed in tight polyester suits, kicking out short fat legs and singing “Caravan”: “Turn up your radd-io! Turn it up now! La-Lah, Lah!”

  Jesus didn’t get the joke. Guess you didn’t see The Last Waltz, I said. He didn’t answer. I noticed he was distracted by a soccer mom in Lululemon sweat pants. He asked me what a Lululemon was. I was impressed by his knowledge of brands. I told him a Lululemon was a lemon with no sense of direction.

  Of the other large vehicles in the parking lot, many were pickup trucks. These were leased shock-and-awe machines, Mack tough, grills embossed with ram’s skulls. They were parked at crazy angles, like they didn’t give a tobacco-spit about smaller trucks, cars, and e-bikes. These Super Bowl bad boys were used to owning the playground. They had to be seen to be believed, especially the supersized ones, the newly waxed and buffed. They were doing what bodybuilders do when they line up on stage at the end of a competition, flexing fenders and six-pack crash bars.

  Once again, I had occasion to stop and make a silent prayer to the One True God who lives in the stone house in the sunset sky, and who, on the weekend, barbecues muslims on His all-chrome George Foreman grill. I said, dear God, or whatever means the good, or whatever, please, sometime, before I die, please let me find a way to live for a few years in a country where there are no pickup trucks and no minivans. Jesus thought this was very funny.

  It was Sunday. Not surprisingly, I found the entrance to the emporium thronged, and the throngers entranced, though by what I couldn’t yet say, never before having visited a big-box store. Whatever it was, they hadn’t dressed up for it. It was all sweats and leggings, tent-tops and singlets, cargo-pants, white socks in sneakers, fake tans on wrinkles, buckled toes in thong sandals. In fairness to Jesus, he didn’t pass judgment on their sartorial sloppiness and, in fairness to the shoppers, they didn’t pass any remarks on his ratty old robe and tan desert boots.

  I pictured Lila in this crowd, a raspberry finch among the juncos. She had a way with colour. She had a way with style that I always thought was hard-wired. But her recent conversion affected even this aspect of her personality. She had started to tone it down.

  I interrupted my train of thought. I hadn’t come here to think about Lila.

  Drop me in a crowd, I said to Jesus, and I will always think I was put there to observe the human condition. This is most likely a manifestation of my perpetual anxiety—that low-frequency wavelength through which I’ve apprehended the world since the moment I slipped free after eight hours lodged in the birth canal, an experience that only bolstered my past-life memory of having been corralled and subsequently herded over a cliff to my death. “Do you follow?” I asked Jesus. He raised his eyebrows ever so slightly—was he being sardonic? Of course, he had every right. Son of, and indivisible from, the all-knowing and most-high, who knew every hair on every head, and therefore must have had at least a passing familiarity with comb-overs of the corporately inclined band of hirsute homosapiens who had hounded me to my death. He nodded enthusiastically, indicating
that he did indeed have intimate knowledge of that pre-historic travesty. I could see he was a playful guy.

  I told him that the empty carts on their way into the big-box store and the overloaded carts on the way out reminded me of school, especially of science lab. I asked Jesus to picture the heart and to let that image broaden to the vascular system before narrowing it to the pulmonary system (I said Yeah! Mony Mony. Ride the pony. Mony Mony!— this was a mnemonic device I had created in school to remember which phase of the circulatory process moved the blood from the heart to the lungs and back to the heart again). I asked Jesus to observe how those carts were oxygen-starved on the way in and oxygen-fat on the way out.

  Jesus said that the way of breath is the way of the soul.

  I told him that I knew what he meant, because not only was the big-box store a filling station for carts, it was also a filling station for the human spirit. Those going in had the lean look of the materialistically horny and those coming out had the vigorous sluggishness of the materialistically sated, which reminded me of an old song: the worms crawled in and the worms crawled out, they crawled in thin and they crawled out stout.

  When I looked around again, Jesus was gone. Somehow he got past the greeter who stopped me dead in my tracks. “Card,” she said. A trim woman in her fifties with dyed brown hair, she smiled and shook her head when I explained that I was there to sign copies of my book. “Card,” she said again, all the while keeping an eye out for anyone trying to sneak past her.

  “You’re French,” I said, reading her name tag. I then proceeded to recite to her, in the huskiest tones I could muster, the only lines of French I could remember: “Allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de glorie est arrivé!” The opening lines of the Marseillaise, all the while holding up—so that it sat just on the blurry edge of her peripheral vision—my 1983 Co-Op card. Her eyes got a little bit misty and she appeared to lose the power of speech. By this I mean that her lips began to move but no sound came out. Perhaps she really was French, but sixth or seventh generation, assimilated to the point of near invisibility. Ah, la France, what was it to her now but a phantom limb, a cauterized stump of tongue that moved silently in her spirit and found expression only in her glittering dark eyes?

  “Books?” I asked.

  “See Bob and Wade,” she said, gesturing behind her towards two men. She added, “Those are really their names.”

  I entered bedazzlement. Racks of lights with a candlepower equivalent to the combined luminescence of every wick dipped in tallow or wax that had ever been lit between the first flare of creation and the invention of electric light. Not only did light flash down, it seemed to bounce back up again, ping-ponging between floor tiles of purest white and Styrofoam ceiling tiles of most brilliant white, back and forth at 186,282 miles per second, until there, in the confined space of the big-box store, it somehow found an extra kick and accelerated to the point that it created a visible texture in the air, a kind of ether perm.

  That texture seemed to be the source of the bedazzlement that shone in everyone’s eyes. A look that teetered somewhere between awe and bewilderment. It also explained why, in the infernal warmth, my teeth began to chatter. I grasped instantly why stork-leg Wade and buoy-shaped Bob were outfitted in red waistcoats with a fluorescent yellow X. I watched them set up an enormous plasma TV that was almost identical to the 60-inch model that Lila had recently bought and installed in the living room. She now spent most of her days in front of it, reclining on the modular leatherette couch that had been part of the same delivery, brown leatherette that stuck to the skin and made farting sounds whenever she moved.

  “Can we help you, sir?” Wade and Bob spoke in unison.

  I was going to ask them if they had seen Jesus, but thought better of it. My reason: I experienced a sudden crisis of confidence; I was suddenly not sure, in that alien space, if all parts of my body would work as commanded when called upon. It was conceivable I would open my mouth to speak and emit nothing but a foul gurgle and a puff of hot steam. Also at play was the thought that stork-leg Wade might turn out to be Bob and buoy-shape Bob might turn out to be Wade, proving that irony was at play even here in the big-box store, at which point my worldview would surely collapse, like a beer can crushed on the head of a colossal moron.

  So I stayed with the herd, the herd of bewilder-beasts, with whom I had navigated the parched entrance, and who now fanned out along the long avenues and aisles. Where, I wondered, had Jesus wandered?

  I turned three-sixty, spotting at two-hundred-and seventy degrees the woman who had greeted me at the entrance. She must have been going on break, perhaps to a windowless cinder-block staff room where she would nibble on the local version of the baguette, a soggy six-inch sub, while sipping a café au lait made from instant coffee and skim milk. Bonjour, I wanted to shout to her. Bonjour! Je ne suis pas une crocodile!

  The idea of the author in me is decidedly French and has been ever since a son of that motherland pronounced the author dead. As an author, I still struggle to parse the complexities of his intuition. Indeed, this was how I occupied myself as I searched the store for books. I decided that Barthes’s assertion had something to do with the competitive nature of Franco-German relations and was perhaps a belated response to Friedrich Nietzsche’s famous pronouncement about God. It is a little known fact that Nietzsche’s conclusion was inspired by a letter from his semi-literate uncle, Heinz, who had immigrated to Canada in the late nineteenth century, settling in the Kitchener-Waterloo area. Now Friedrich—always a bit of a schoolmaster—was in the habit of correcting his uncle’s spelling and grammar, adding punctuation and striking out extra consonants that the lisping Heinz had a habit of adding in his written English. On the fateful day, Friedrich read and corrected his uncle’s broken English as usual. After a first paragraph consisting mostly of salutations and descriptions of the Canadian weather, Heinz began the second with a line that was all the more shocking for its off-hand delivery: “Our coussin Gord is dead.” Unable to break out of grammarian mode, Friedrich immediately struck out the extra consonant in cousin; at which point the great man’s editorial impulse simply kept going, causing him—subconsciously at least—to erase the second consonant in his cousin’s name. The rest is history. The semantic weight of that misreading did its subterranean work, its full report striking Friedrich with the force of revelation some months later.

  Jesus made his appearance again. He was carrying a jumbo pack of bread sticks. Enough for the five thousand, he said, before he disappeared into the lights.

  There seemed no way to acclimatize to the brightness: even after five minutes, the blazing fluorescence was playing havoc with my vision. I wandered through all kinds of departments—electronics, ladies’ wear, dry goods, hardware, men’s wear, but everything I saw in these aisles seemed half-formed, like I was watching a photograph in the process of being developed.

  As if to prove my point, a man I had known for years ambled towards me, pushing an overloaded cart. I started to summon a smile, to formulate what I might say, but I stopped when it became clear he did not recognize me. He passed me with a sore-footed gait, chewing. Had I been snubbed? No. I was just so out-of-context he automatically painted me out of the picture. To him, I was no more than a phantom-inducing undigested bit of beef. It was no great leap, then, to the revelation that I was all but invisible in the big-box store. And if Lila’s newfound love of this place was somehow emblematic of her rebirth, did it mean I was becoming invisible to her as well?

  Not that Lila was getting harder to see. Here was a stack of the 1000g packs of tiramisu-flavored fudge, a perpetual supply of which could now be found in the right-hand crisper of our fridge. Here was the lifeboat goat cheese combo—twenty different flavours. And here was her most recent obsession: Taffy MacD’s peanut butter crunch shortbread cookies, the grand tin of one-hundred-and-twenty individually wrapped pieces.

  Since her conversion, her many appetites for pleasure had gone underground. When they resurf
aced, she was hungry: for food and for useless things. The effects were beginning to show. She had started reaching into the back of the closet for clothes she had bought during the last of her pregnancy scares.

  The new and simplified Lila was devoid of irony, almost humorless. “Break off that tryst with apple crisp!” I’d announce. “Think sow when you see almond cream chow-chow! Blast a Jericho trumpet at baked Alaska crumpet! Throw a wobbler when offered blackberry cobbler! Learn to say hump it to Canterbury crumpets!” Lila would just look at me with a bovine calm, stoic in the face of my unchristian behavior.

  I turned the corner to find the Big Brother computerized sewing machine—another one of her recent buys. Sixty built-in stitches, with one-hundred-and-ten stitch functions, and touch screen for stitch selection. Along with this contraption Lila bought three bolts of grey gingham cloth. What was coming next—a habit?

  But I wasn’t going to think about Lila.

  From the gloominess of my thoughts I was rescued—as I have been so often in my life—by books. In this case, it was the unmistakable sight of a tower of paperbacks, stacked flat, spines outward. I realized I had passed them once already and had missed them largely because I had been looking for bookcases. Books in the big-box store were arrayed in a clearing at least as long as a football field and about a quarter as wide, in bins.

  Standing at the northwest corner of this expanse, I let my gaze rove south, then east, then northeast. I was looking, of course, for a little lean-to, a table with my novel displayed on it, my book poster fluttering in the air-conditioned breeze, and next to it the smiling publisher’s representative, perhaps cradling a bouquet of red carnations. No such sight greeted me. No author’s table was anywhere to be seen.