I want to be a Preacher.

I want to be a Preacher at the Church of Good God Almighty, I'm Loving You. The Church of Great Day In The Morning You Sure Look Nice. I want the church to be big as an airplane hanger and full of Everybody in the World, from little teeny babies to crooked old women who wear hats and fan themselves with the Program.

I want a choir too. I want them all to wear Satin Robes and sway back and forth like big happy birds perched in a row on a telephone line. We could have guest singers every week. Superstars like Sting would call me and beg to come sing in My Church because when he sang and the choir clapped along, all the people in the front pew had tears streaming down their shiny cheeks from being so happy.

Everyone would join in, even Me though I can't sing, but we'd sound so sweet and perfect we wouldn't need words. We'd open our mouths and out would pop God like sweet candy from Happy Pez Dispensers.

God would sing in toungues like some people do and with snakes like others and even in robes with a Big Hat just like the Pope himself. "Laba-daba-hibby-shubappy!!" Just like that.

When it was time for My Sermon, everyone would get real quiet and noone would talk, just like in a movie theater when the audience acts just like I like. They'd sit and listen to every word I said and I'd watch the words slide in one ear and get inside their skulls and do a little Happy Church Dance right behind their eyes.

"Hey Preacher Hugh!" those words would shout when their little heads popped out the other ear, "We're loving our New Home!"

I was preaching though, so I wouldn't stop but I might just smile bigger and wink at those words like a really slick band singer does with all the dressed up ladies swooning over his show. I'd be busy doing the Preacher Dance with God, grabbing words out of the basket I'd be holding and scattering them over the whole crowd like I was feeding all the chickens. Giving them some food to peck and something to cluck about all day and night.

When I was done, you'd know because the lights dimmed and just one spotlight hit my face, making my blue eyes gleam and shooting off SuperRays from the diamonds in my ears, Diamonds Personally Given to me by God for all the Good Work I'd done.

All the people would start jumping and yelling out "AMEN!" and "WHOOPY WHOOPY!" and "BINGO!" till we all got so full of the Good Stuff, we'd pop like a shaken can of soda and Joy would spray all over the walls.

That's when we'd wave our arms and clap our hands and the lights would flash and spark like fireflies fucking in the dark. We would be so Happy, I promised God we would, and I have on a Brand New Beautiful Suit to prove it.

At the end, I'd stand by the door and shake each and every hand, sometimes more than once and sometimes I'd just grab someone and we'd hug like grass hugs a hill. People would be going back to get in line again but I didn't care and when they got to me I'd just say "Well HOW have you been?" like they had been on a trip far, far away and had just come home.

After church, I'd have Church Supper on the porch with all my friends and there'd be bisquits and chicken and potatos and gravy and rice and sweet tea. Before we'd eat, we'd all grab hands and look each other in the eyes and say "Thanks for asking".

I want to be a Preacher.
11:36:59 PM    sro home /

EVE

Five.

The worst thing so far about the New Year was the fireworks because they reminded him of bombs. Since September 11, he only thought of bombs and airplanes falling like meteors from the sky. He imagined terrorists and the families of terrorists watching television, their hearts stopping at the moment their fathers, husbands and sons dropped from the sky and were engulfed by flame. Where, he wondered, were their hearts when the ball in Times Square dropped? Did they stop for the New Year as well? The New Year in America officially begins in New York and midnight in Los Angeles was like a polite response, a hand over the mouth after the coughing has stopped.

Four.

Everyone had asked about resolutions and he had nothing to tell them, he couldn’t even fabricate a polite reply. He felt resolutions, like holidays, marked time with beginnings, middles and ends and his life was none of the above. It slid across the screen like the stopped pulse of the patient who causes doctors on TV to pause and reflect on their mission.

His mission was to survive and nothing more, no coups to overthrow or dictators to disarm, only to return to headquarters alive and unscared by the distant memory of the life he had lived. He had help from others like him, once brave soldiers who passed their dying words like a torch passed from Olympian to Olympian. Now he held the torch while sitting alone watching others on TV celebrate the life they might have.

Three.

He was in exile, like Napoleon after the wars. He structured his life to be an island (no man is an island) after he’d fled from the things that mattered - the men, the friends, the nights he walked unafraid in the streets at all hours. He was now afraid of the night, afraid that any minute the safety he’d once enjoyed would evaporate like smoke from a bomb around him. He sat in his apartment, reveling in yet imprisoned by his solitude. It was New Year’s Eve and while the world danced and kissed around him, he stared alone at the faces trapped on the small bright screen.

Napoleon would have become friends with the guards as he had. Friends (though he no longer has friends in this world) that sit and listen to stories he pulls like a loose string from the fabric of what had once been his life. They lean back in their chairs while he speaks, their minds catching on an occasional word and throwing themselves like hooked fish from the sea only to return and swim quickly from the boat. Occasionally he’d wait for a response - a raised brow, a throat cleared, a glance from the floor to the ghost of the past which hovered between them like the faint wisp of a cigarette.

Two.

He tried, as he watched the excited faces squeezed in the streets of his dreams, to make a list of resolutions - a list that would make him feel human, interested, involved with the lives and concerns people shared. One, he thought, I will not smoke again. This statement hovered like a reluctant bird afraid to touch wet cement which would bind it to the ground. He loved to smoke, the process, the way you inhaled part of a vanishing thing into your body. Like sex, you absorb what never was and exhale the fleeting feelings which drift away while you watch from the comfort of the past.

He was not resolute about never smoking. He could tell the few people he knew (to make them think) he was changing but he knew he was not. He would not make a resolution about what he enjoyed with such vigorous pleasure. He liked doing something with his hands, holding chronology between his fingers while the ashes briefly flared and turned gray like all memories do. He was dying and to die while absorbing something he could actually touch kept him from fading like transmissions of an old TV.

He thought of other things he should resolve to change but nothing was worth the wait. Nothing was worth trudging through till the next Eve where he could look back and think, “Yes, I did that.” What is there left to prove?, he thinks vainly, painfully. Everything. He looks over his life as Dictator, Emperor, Master of This World and ponders “Where, if I could, would I go again?” Which countries does he long to stand on and feel he has conquered once more?

One.

Napoleon thought only of Josephine, he is sure. She was the only place he marched with fear and when he died, he thought of her frail figure entering a room and the fear of losing her kept Napoleon connected to the guards, his cell, the island where he spent his life.

Could I resolve a Josephine, he wondered? Could he love again and fear - the two emotions so completely entwined that as he feared another person entering His Room, he embraced the fright of walking alone at night on quiet streets. When he arrived home, he’d re-live a stranger’s approach and envision a gun, a stick, a loud proclamation of their feeling towards him. What response was appropriate for the rush which erupted deep inside, a feeling thought dead and gone, ashes to ashes, lifting itself from his chest to walk like a stilted zombie? “I love you”, he pictured screaming. “I love you for making me alive!” The startled walker, returning home to feed their dog and check their mail, would gasp and quickly sprint away from the flushed, lonely man.

He watched the ball slowly glide to it’s throne high above the excited people - a tape of it’s trip, a memory of where it had been, what it represented. A reminder that it had, in fact, done it’s job. Every year it lowered and people knew time had passed, again, now and now and now. It did it’s duty without fear and because it had no fear, to him alone in his room thousands of miles and hours away, it held no love. Napoleon on his deathbed - a small man made smaller by the vastness of time before, during and ahead of him - had the love of what he had touched in another place. He did not fear death as he did not love it. He feared never seeing Josephine again.

He took his remote, clicked off the TV and went to bed, exhausted by love and fear and resolving that this year, he’d surrender.

Happy New Year.

3:58:43 PM    sro home /