Black Jesus

by Simone Felice

‘No it’s not,’ he says and something about the way he says it makes the dancer cold inside. ‘Where’s my mom?’ he says.

  ‘She’s outside with Joe. The wind blew the tarp off its poles, things are blowing away.’

  ‘I need my pills.’

  Gloria doesn’t answer.

  ‘Can you get them for me?’ says the boy.

  ‘Are you sure you wanna keep taking those things? They can’t be any good for you.’

  ‘What else do I have?’

  The stripper doesn’t really know how to answer that.

  ‘Please, Gloria.’

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Mom keeps ’em by the sink.’

  On her way back up the ladder, the pill bottle in her back pocket, climbing with one hand, a glass of water in the other, Gloria hears Bea Two-Feathers’ voice in her head: A fence to keep in the sadness.

  So many different kinds of fences, thinks the runaway as she clears the ladder’s last rung. White picket. Electric. Barbed wire. Strip pole. Desert camo. Pain meds. Old folks’ home. What the fuck’s the difference?

  Now they sit side by side on Lionel’s bed. In her absence the boy must have reached down and fished around on the floor for Babar because the stuffed elephant joins them now in a tangle of polyester blankets and bed sheets, his droopy gold crown, his white tusks turned a deep grimy yellow with time.

  Contrary to the voice in her head, Gloria twists off the hard top and taps out two big pale tablets from the oversized flesh-colored bottle in her hand boasting words like ‘OxyContin’, ‘60 MG’, ‘Keep Out of Reach of Children’.

  Then she puts them in his open palm. And he pops them in his mouth. Now she lifts the cool water to his lips and he drinks it down.

  Outside in the blowing downpour they hear Debbie yell, ‘Hoist it, Joe! Hoist it!’ Fat Deb, the batty Ahab of Gay Paris.

  ‘Thank you, Gloria.’

  ‘For what? Feeding you this crap?’

  ‘I don’t know what else to do,’ he says and his voice shakes, his hand shakes.

  ‘I don’t either,’ she says and takes his cold hand. ‘But I’m gonna help you find it.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Really. I promise. Enjoy the high while you can. I think I know a way we can put these things to better use.’

  When the refrigerator door swings open in the charged silence of this apartment, Ross Klein emerges alien, discolored, wide-eyed and gasping for air like a rescued Han Solo in the Hollywood space epoch of old.

  A few blocks west you can hear Bebop’s sad recorder blowing, soft but magnetic in its way. A melody to rock you, to heal you, to bless your life, to curse your fortune and blow you away. A little something to set you on your feet again, to lighten your load, to trick you into thinking that maybe you know what love means. A song to dazzle. One to spark a forest fire.

  Standing here naked in his big vacant flat the critic catches his breath and has a last look around. The black sofa, the empty bed. The gleaming baseball bat in the corner. The silent record collection built into the wall. His German headphones. The bathroom door wide open, the dark mirror therein, the sink dripping slow, counting its own eerie time. And the drawn window shades at the far end of the space, a thin crack of light through the one Tracy was known to stand at singing songs she wrote that no one hears.

  Now he turns back to the sculpture he built while she slept. The figure. Its milk-carton head leaning coy and childlike atop its bent shoulders. Its lunchmeat-drawer hips cocked in a way that might suggest the thing was hungry to strike up a jig. Its egg-rack feet at the ready. Its thin steel arms reaching.

  Reaching for what?

  Maybe for the thing we’re all reaching for. That big feeling. The one we can’t put our finger on, can’t say its name.

  Joy.

  Love.

  A clean conscience.

  A cure for emptiness.

  A warm putty to fill in all the holes that gape.

  These things might approach it. But we reach for more. It’s got to be out there. It just has to be.

  Free nights and weekends.

  Diet pill.

  Radical cleric.

  Get rid of worry lines.

  Improvised explosive device.

  Bible camp.

  Blind carbon copy.

  Who is this figure in the kitchen?

  Maybe it’s Ross as a boy, just about the time his mom disappeared. Or the poet he ached to be, frozen in distance and time somehow, still trying to find a song so fine it might whisper her home again.

  Maybe it’s some kid whose heart he broke with a bad review. Or maybe it’s Gloria, or Desiree, or whatever the hell the stripper’s real name is, dancing in the red sun, her fine legs back the way they were, bending to her pirouette at last: listen to the crowd. Or maybe the figure is you. Maybe it’s me.

  Now Ross does a strange thing. As gingerly as a schoolgirl on her last morning of classes, he walks over to the big bed, squats down and pulls out the black shoebox wherein Gloria’s worn ballet slippers hide. Then he takes them out and forces them on one after the other and walks to the door and, finding the bolt already free, turns the knob and leaves for the street below.

  These are days without limits. When a child can lie awake in its bed anywhere in suburbia with curiosity gnawing and climb from the blankets and enter the right search in the dark and sit watching a real man get his head hacked off with a long knife on the haunted screen, the shaky camerawork, the calm, bearded witnesses in the background, their alien headdress, different hats, different routes to heaven.

  What color is God?

  Does he have a videophone?

  There are lovers on the windy beach of Venice, California. There are hustlers, find them where they perch. There is a man with a cotton candy machine. And one who sells cheap sunglasses. And the lady giving fortunes out for money. Where is it all headed? How does it play out?

  Unshaven and pale of skin, Ross Klein comes reeling and foul down Rose Avenue in his white slippers, naked as the day he was born. It’s a busy Saturday afternoon. A thousand tourists watch him come, like something they’ve seen before, some vision from the Prophecy Channel late at night. They pull their children close. They part the way to let him pass. Who is this cracked nudist come among us? Why am I nauseous? Why am I thrilled?

  Then slowly, as if by some living contagion, these suntanned witnesses in colored shorts and flip-flops begin, one after another, to lift their cell phones and shoot. Lift your digital and shoot. Call the cops. Lift your disposable and shoot shoot shoot. Save this picture. Post it where you like. Share it with friends. Share your video. Post it for all to see.

  It’s not till he’s halfway to the boardwalk that he really takes notice of the leering throng of low paparazzi gathered in rows on either side of his advance. Now he hears the clicking of their gear, senses the depth of their excitement, the high they feel, the puzzlement, their palpable righteousness and disgust. This fallen commenter come at last to be judged. Now who can count the limits of his shame?

  He makes for the sea. The wind blows his hair. Gulls circle off above the pagodas. Something dead in the sand. Sun falling red. In his frightened gallop he collides with a girl on rollerskates just before he reaches the boardwalk, the headphones jerking from her ears like a net being snipped as she crashes to the asphalt. But look, like some demented hurdler Ross recovers, gains his footing, keeps on towards the crashing blue Pacific that beckons.

  When he gets to the end of the pier he stops, out of breath, his hands on his knees, his head bent down. Then he stands up and looks at the water, his chest still heaving, all the air inside him tinged with the sick reality of his heart. There’s a soda bottle dancing in the surf. And a plastic bag like a duped soul, jerked this way and that. Junky piper on the
beach. Gulls. Sirens in the distance. Every helicopter scanning for fires. Every rat to the sea.

  ‘Where’s Gloria?’ says Black Jesus.

  ‘Not sure, honey. She took off on her scooter a while ago, think she mighta said somethin’ ’bout going to the store, though I can’t imagine what she might need out there that she couldn’t find right here at the DQ,’ muses Debbie White and gives a proud glance about the flea market, scanning the whole of her worthless kingdom with a faint gleam in her eye that might be the beginnings of a tear. It’s a warm day for October, geese in the sky from time to time, bright leaves on the ground, red, yellow, copper.

  ‘Well, speak of the devil, here she is now,’ says Deb turning to the gravel parking lot where the girl rumbles in and turns off her engine, kicks out the kickstand, yanks off her crazy helmet, the pink shield catching the sunlight as she hangs it on the handlebar.

  ‘I’m still not a hundred per cent about this one yet, Lionel. Half the time it’s like she’s in some kind of dream world.’

  ‘Look who’s talkin’, Ma.’

  ‘Shhhhh,’ whispers Deb. ‘Here she comes.’

  ‘Hi guys.’

  ‘Hi Gloria, beautiful day, huh?’

  ‘You can say that again.’

  ‘Beautiful day,’ says Black Jesus, twenty-four hours without his pills.

  ‘How’s business been?’ says Gloria.

  ‘Not too shabby. We sold the wolf painting. The big one that used to hang right there. About goddamn time. Got sixteen bucks for it.’

  ‘It used to be on the wall in my room when I was a kid,’ says Lionel. ‘Then I swapped it for Iron Maiden, Stranger in a Strange Land.’

  ‘What you got there, sweetie?’ asks Deb, tossing her chin at the plastic grocery bag in Gloria’s hand.

  ‘Oh, just some stuff to make an angel food cake. Which brings me to my next question: Hey Debbie, do you mind if I use the kitchen?’

  ‘Um, I’m not really sure I should just be letting anybody fire up that big—’

  ‘Mom,’ growls Lionel. ‘Be easy for once in your life.’

  ‘Okay, fine. You can bake your cake,’ says Deb, a hot fist clenched in her sweatpants pocket. ‘Just make sure you clean up after yourself.’

  ‘No troubles, bubbles,’ says Gloria with a smile on her face. ‘Thanks a million.’

  An hour later Gloria slides the wet batter in a deep silver pan into the oven at 350 degrees Fahrenheit and shuts the oven door and gets to work on the icing. Traditionally speaking, an angel food cake is served without any kind of glaze on top. But this cake isn’t for just anyone.

  Into a small pot on the cracked Formica counter she pours what she imagines to be half a cup of milk. Then with a match she lights a burner on the big industrial stove and picks up the pot and puts it on the flame. From her grocery bag she pulls a package of Price Chopper brand confectionery sugar and opens it with her teeth and pours half of it down into the simmering milk. Now she adds a little orange juice from the fridge and stirs the potion with an old noisy whisk she found in one of the grubby kitchen drawers at her waist.

  Once it starts to thicken she lowers the heat and walks back towards the front of the Dairy Queen where the couch she sleeps on lies musty and still upon the old linoleum. Straddling the arm of the couch, she bends and lifts the plaid cushion beneath her electric blanket and fishes around and pulls out the bottle of OxyContin she commandeered from Lionel White, US Marine.

  On her way back to the stove, she stops at a faded red milk crate on the floor in the helter-skelter of junk and boxes that dominate this once orderly summertime oasis and squats down and takes up the rusty hammer she’s been eyeing all day, not ignoring the fact that even in this untested position her bad leg feels better than it has any time since that nightmare hour she left LA for good.

  Back in the kitchen she stands and spreads a New York Post on the countertop. Top military analysts say the troop surge is working . . . The dismembered body of a prostitute was discovered in a shopping bag outside the Galleria Mall in Poughkeepsie, this marks the third such incident this year . . . Michael Jackson’s death linked to painkillers, doctor brought in for questioning. King of Pop or Wacko Jacko? Join our online poll.

  Gloria twists open the pill bottle and drains its contents onto the newspaper. Over a dozen fat white tablets in all. Tossing the bottle in the garbage, she squares her hips and sets to folding the New York Post over the drugs in a tight and careful manner, as one might go about shaping a child’s paper boat for deployment in a bathtub.

  Once the folds are secure, the girl reaches for the hammer and lifts it over her head and begins violently beating the newspaper, the noise of her bludgeon drowning out the simmering milk and sugar on the stove. Lucky for her, Debbie is two minutes away from selling a VCR to a Mexican couple out under the tarps or else she’d come running in to see what the racket was.

  Setting the hammer aside and peeling back the edges of the paper, Gloria finds what she’d imagined: a fine powder lying white and halfway mystic upon the printed words, enough to knock out a horse.

  So she turns to the stove and switches off the burner and folds the newspaper in half and dumps the powder down into the hot icing and whisks the pot until the two things are one.

  She sets out for Serenity Grove on foot, the dancer we call Gloria. Before leaving the Dairy Queen she surprised Debbie by asking if it was okay for her to borrow some things to wear from the few tired clothing racks heaped with freakish miscellany scattered about the junk sale. A long fur coat, fake rabbit. A feathered bowler for her head. A battered pair of black stiletto boots. A blood-red teddy. Then she surprised Debbie and Lionel alike when she said, ‘Meet me at Serenity Grove in an hour and fifteen. Six thirty sharp. Please don’t argue with me. Bring Joe, he’ll understand. Have the station wagon ready. Movie starts at seven!’

  She walks the highway, the angel food cake in a wide hatbox held out before her in both hands like an offering, the garish outfit she chose inspiring more than one passionate honk, more than just a ‘How much?’ from the smokers in Shakespeare’s gravel lot.

  The lady at the front desk of this ridiculous eroding rural nursing home nearly faints into her cream of mushroom soup when Gloria breezes through the door and shimmies up to her and says, ‘Singing telegram for Director Steve.’

  Still in shock, the queasy secretary leads her down the tan hall and leaves her at a door that bears the man’s name and title in gold decals. After adjusting her fur coat and smearing more lipstick on her red mouth, she knocks and hears him bark a muted, ‘Just one minute,’ paranoia in his voice as if the man might be finishing up some secret mischief of his own.

  When he gets to the door with a jangling of keys and opens it and stands facing this callgirl in all her sleazy feline glory the first thing he thinks is, Man alive, those Visualize Your Own Reality books on tape must be starting to work.

  ‘Do come in,’ says the director, and as she brushes past him with the cake box in her hands he pops his balding head out into the hall to make sure the coast is clear, and seeing that indeed it is he shuts his office door again and locks it from the inside.

  ‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’ he says and sits down and leans back in his black swivel chair, fingers laced in his lap. The paneling on the walls looks like wood but of course it’s not. It might be that this man has spent so many stale hours here that he’s taken on the same diminished look as the shag carpet at his feet, the big telephone on the desk, the kinky paperweight, the grim roll of flypaper dangling from the ceiling. All his diplomas are perfectly straight where they hang. His audio books are all in a row. This is a very neat man. Everything in its right place. Then why does it feel so wrong?

  Our heroine wastes no time. Deftly she sheds the fake rabbit and lets it fall to the floor in a heap to unveil the scant lingerie she chose, the skin beyond, the d
ark haunted patch below her pale belly.

  ‘You must have done something really magnanimous in a past life,’ she purrs, praying magnanimous was the right word to use.

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ admits Director Steve, his eyes wide.

  ‘I think we need a little privacy,’ she whispers. ‘Why don’t you send the staff on an errand for a few hours?’

  ‘Touché. Great idea,’ he whispers back, hard in his JC Penney business slacks. Picking up the phone on his desk he dials zero and waits for a voice and says, ‘Janet? No I’m fine, she’s an old friend of my sister. I was calling ’cause after seeing my friend here all dressed up like this I remembered Halloween is coming right up. Why don’t you and Julio and Keith take the van down to Wal-Mart and pick out some costumes for yourselves and for the oldies but goodies in our charge. What? I don’t care, you can be anything you want. No, it’s okay, you can use the church donation box. No, don’t worry, I’ve cleared it with the pastor.’

  So let it be done. Not one of his underpaid peons will argue with that. All three of them abandon their posts and make for the Wal-Mart, ten miles east, where all things are found.

  ‘I think we’re alone now,’ sings Gloria, and climbs on his lap and straddles the chair. ‘There doesn’t seem to be anyone around.’

  ‘I think we’re alone now,’ sings back the director in a shockingly pleasant alto. ‘The beating of our hearts is the only sound.’

  Now the callgirl bends and reaches her hand down into the top of her tall boot and pulls out two thin candles and a plastic lighter. The 99-cent affair she stole in a different life, under a different sun, different name, when there where two kinds of deserts, the one she rode through, the one inside.

  At least now she’s got a use for it.

  ‘Turn the lights out,’ she demands.

  ‘Lucky thing I’ve got the clapper,’ he boasts and slaps his palms together twice and the room goes black. She can smell him. Their bodies this close. ‘Lucky it’s the clapper I’ve got,’ he adds. ‘And not the clap.’ And his laugh in the dark is like a dead cat in a bag.