PROPHET AND LOSS

I think you all know where we're headed...




EPISODE V: Prophet and Loss

(If you've no fucking clue what's going on, go down about five posts, and also, on me.)

I had rejoined my comrades just long enough to show off a cute girl I met, and to become annoyed. This occurred twice, and with different cute girls. On the second occasion, I really only bumped into them by accident. We were soon all stumbling down the sweaty, pregnant streets of Bourbon, when we caught verbal hazing from three different street preachers—only one of which was drunk. With an overwhelming whiskey voice and overbearing nature, one grand and Godly mammoth “Ex-Con & Prisoner of Jesus Christ” seemed a bit mad in the membranes. He cried and laughed in arbitrary spurts. He promised a sun blackened to pitch and a moon to rise in menstrual red, pretty much any ol’ day now. Were he a slightly smaller Prisoner of Christ, I might have inquired about tickets, or how this whole “crimson moon” thing would affect Earth’s cheese supply. But, given the formerly incarcerated Prophet’s fluctuating glares of lust for God and lust for God-only-knows, I resolved not to chance becoming his Bride of Christ, or extending any invitations to his Second Coming.

While that more insane of the evangelistic trinity towered over some other band of squirming heathens and lapsed Catholics, we were left sermonless for all of three minutes until the second of the Godly gaggle cornered me with gasping sour breaths, as he was the aforementioned drunkard. He smelled more like wine than cheap hooch. Such a sauced and jolly Jesuit was he—not mean at all. He had a depraved sort of glow to him, like he had been huffing his Bible Highlighter pens since God turned on the lights this morning. He kept getting in my way, though. He danced a weird little jig along that busy St. Ann walkway, and sang off-key and in-faces. It was the same slurred line over and over again, happily gasping to all, with an eerie, overwrought senile glee: “Hell from beneath is moved for thee, to meet thee at thy coming!” That was his song, joyfully, mercilessly flung with his alcoholic spittle at every wincing bystander who passed.

The third, more cryptic of the Bourbon Street Revival Team kept away from face-to-face confrontations and instead, like the disturbed inmates so increasingly common to the Cloth these days, had his own unsettling way of getting under our skin, and on our nerves. This one liked to write holy little notes, and pass them to you with a mugging bug-eyed frightened scowl. I liked to scowl, too. He passed me three notes over two hours, often following us briefly into pubs and such. I scowled right back. The psychotic scrawling on his mini love-letters were short, but to the point. Today, my messages consisted of “Jesus Want You Back,” “Return to Calvary,” and the more unsettling “I Still Live Within You.” I wrote back to him, just to be nice. I passed him similarly scrawled messages that read, “The Blonde At The Second Table Likes You,” “Today Is The Day Of Salisbury Steaks,” and a third he refused to accept that read, “And Jesus Said, “Yeah I Say Unto Thee, ‘Take Your Medication, Man’.”

We never managed to shake our Dead Sea Post-It writer until I’d already given the Little Creepy Bastard of Heaven a name. He wouldn’t tell us his real name—every time I asked, he fidgeted, and said, “I’m cold!” before shuffling off. So I started calling him Philemon, after one of the shortest epistles in the Bible. Carl, who remained inconceivably ignorant about the whole ordeal, knew only to shout when we did. He also didn’t get the name, so after we taunted the Poor Holy Minion, Carl kept chiming, “Hey Philemon—Where’s Pickachu?” When all this got old to the others, Rick swore he’d beat the holy shit out of him, and that nothing could hold him back. I snickered until we left the bar. Rick soon cornered old Philemon passing post-it pearls of wisdom to smirking, celebrating sodomites around St. Ann and Burgundy—right outside Café LaFitte, no less. Passing out what were likely anti-gay Old Testament quotes outside of a major site of homosexual culture like Café Lafitte—the great Man Francisco of Bourbon’s urban queens—was suicide. Rick might have to get in line.

Demonstrating the biggest balls of any religious nut to condemn this fallen earth, Philemon passed a note to Rick—who had never received such a thing before—and swiftly ran away down Bourbon, toward the Bourbon Pub Parade. Rick, who didn’t know any Bible verses, read the note with a pained expression, uncertain of how to take Philemon’s longer-than-usual exhortation. It read, “Call On Me And I Will Come Into You. I Love You As No Other—Open Your Heart, And Invite Me Inside Of You Tonight.” Perhaps the puzzled twisting of Rick’s face was what The Pain of Salvation was all about. He shrugged, and pitched the note. I retrieved it as his tensed back turned, flexing and shuffling away from the crowds, perhaps to hide from all who swore, that night, to love him…deep inside, in Heaven’s special way.

I passed the note to Carl, who—as I mentioned—was oblivious to it all. Oddly enough, not only did Philemon vanish from sight shortly thereafter, but then Carl disappeared also—gone without a trace until the last minutes before departure Sunday Afternoon, when he reappeared without offering a single explanation. Maybe he went to church—the Lord certainly seemed to move in mysterious ways lately.

TO BE CONTINUED...


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