Good to Be God (21 page)

This can’t be true. If you are in a band that’s going places you wouldn’t be parking your arse in a church hall three-quarters empty, struggling to convince one junior archivist that you are.

Most of us, when we’re caught doing something embarrassing

– dick hanging out of trousers, etc. – stop. Not the Gel. He eventually notices everyone is glaring at him and he takes advantage of the attention by reaching into his shoulder bag and unfolding some fanzine. “Here’s a review I wrote about our band, which tells you why we are so good.” He reads it out.

Why isn’t he out on Ocean Drive expounding this to some teenage bunny from Des Moines who might fall for it? I persuade the Gel to leave the hall by promising to listen to his demo and to laud his music to the general populace.

“You’re always welcome here, of course. But you know, the service isn’t the proper time to promote your music,” I say in a gentle, pastor-filled voice that surprises me by its mildness. He gets surprisingly nasty.

“What are you going to do about it, you miserable old man?”

This is the first time I’ve been called an old man.

I’ve long got used to not being a young man, but this is the first time I’ve been pronounced old. Doubtless to a seventeen-year-old like the Gel, I am decomposing. By many standards, 164

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over forty is old. It’s also true that I’m not happy. Miserable is accurate, although not a fair comment, because I work hard to conceal my fundamental despair. This is the curious quality of insults: they can be insulting because they’re not true (“you’re a miserable old man”) or because they are (“you’re a miserable old man”), or even because they’re half true. It’s the contempt that the Gel invests in that description rather than its exactitude that makes it so offensive.

“It’s best if you left,” I say with admirable, pastor-like, calm and compassion. I’m getting good at this. But calm and compassion count for deplorably little on the street.

“Make me,” he shouts, unimaginatively, and waves a fist under my nose. Someone does a bad job of raising a child and the rest of us have to foot the bill. It also astonishes me that teenagers think they invented violence. On top of that, the Gel is so skinny if I sat on him, he’d break into pieces.

I put the holiness on pause. Looking him in the eye, I punch him in the gut and he goes down like an obedient dog. My fist has been hurting since the incident with the corgi, and I’ve resisted the impulse to stick on a black eye. The face has too many bones.

The Gel has lost enough fights to know that it would be unwise to get up. He curls up on the ground, although my blow can’t have been that painful. Giving him a kick in the ribs does occur to me, but that would be ungodly. We’ve clarified matters, and I trust it’s been a teacher blow for him.

I’m a little ashamed of myself, but also a little pleased, which isn’t much use to me. Shame or pleasure you can work with, but not the mix.

“Don’t feel bad about failure,” I add. “You’re in good company.”

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Should you get up or stay down? It’s an engrossing question, and one that you can never answer definitively. I reconsider my behaviour during the Japanese Oak Crisis.

“Think positive,” my wife had told me. Wives tend to be very free with advice. Wives commonly believe they can do a better job of living their husbands’ lives than the husbands. Maybe.

So I was thinking positive. I was so desperate I thought positive as I drove off to sort out the Japanese Oak Crisis. I was cheerful. I wasn’t pretending to be cheerful. I was convinced I could go there and find a solution and everyone would be, if not happy, only slightly disgruntled. We could all go home, get a good night’s sleep, and wake up the next morning with the crisis out of our minds.

I hate bankers, and I’ve always hated bankers, but I’d done a deal with a bank who’d built an enormous new headquarters. I’d been delighted about the deal at first, the biggest I’d ever pulled off. Money had been splashed about because the bank wanted marblier marble than anyone else, and instead of getting some big rubber plants and some high-class goldfish for the building’s atrium, they had imported three Japanese oaks.

The trees were, of course, a rare, outrageously expensive species, and after they had been planted in the atrium it turned out their acquisition and importation had contravened all sorts of laws and that agonizing fines and possibly jail was on the way (one of the drawbacks of oak trees is they are quite conspicuous).

The discomfiture over the oaks would have amused me, it would have amused me a lot, but for the fact they had died.

Fried. Fried, it was maintained, by our lights. When I had done the specs no one had mentioned the oaks, and when they had bought the oaks I doubt they had asked enough searching questions about how to care for them.

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It couldn’t be proved that the lights were the killer, but someone had to be blamed, and the fingers favoured me. I had considered raising the argument that the oaks must be contemptibly weak to be frazzled by a few lights, but decided that wouldn’t help matters.

I’d be positive and offer a discount on the bill (which, as they were a major financial institution, they hadn’t yet paid).

My contact at the bank greeted me with a powerful uppercut and a yelp of outrage.

There are only two responses. Nelson and my crew would say never go down. Never go down on the street, because if you do, you’re finished, they’ll come in with the boot next and your skull will never be the same. But there is the alternative: if you’re punched, lie down.

I did lie down, since, as I was thinking positively, I wasn’t expecting an uppercut. Secondly, having grown up in a big city, I recognized someone whom I was incapable of knocking down.

It would have been more embarrassing and awkward if there had been spectators, but it was just the two of us. Also getting up, even if only to get knocked down again, wouldn’t improve matters or jolly the paying of our invoice.

It was more satisfying for all concerned that I stayed on the floor, while my attacker screamed at me about the ruin of his career, and as I was on the premises of a major financial institution I was optimistic about not being kicked to death.

It’s disheartening to see how abruptly civilization goes. During prosperity, most of us are willing to give up a seat to a little old lady on a bus, but to avoid losing our job, the pension, the whole happiness pack, most of us would willingly do some murder.

Giving up a fight damages you, runs one argument, leaves you a little crippled. Did I stay down because of cowardice, common 167

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sense or laziness? Or a mix of all three? I haven’t figured it out and it’s unlikely I ever will.

G

I’ve been ill for two days now. I spent all day in bed yesterday, but despite the rest I’m worse. There’s nothing like illness for making you give up completely. All my plans for making my centrality more central are gone. I care about nothing. I could be boxed up and buried without protest.

I’m making a cup of tea, when Gulin returns. When I want to say hello, a prolonged racking cough comes out, so prolonged and racking that I see stars.

“Are you okay?” she asks.

As I attempt to say yes, another bout of rasping, cruel coughing is unleashed.

“Have you got medicine?”

I nod.

“What?”

“Well… I took some paracetamol.” Gulin regards me with dissatisfaction. I haven’t seen her for weeks. She must be back to check up on Orinoco.

Another distasteful bout of coughing shakes me. Gulin is passing judgement on me. Too stupid to look after himself. She may have a point.

“I’ll get you something.”

“No, I’m fine.”

But she’s already on her way out. I’m too ill to protest any more. I’m too ill to care that much, but I am ashamed about someone who’s been working a twelve-hour day for the last week driving out to get me some medicine.

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Half an hour later I’m handed a packet of throat lozenges.

Gulin refuses to reveal the price or to accept any payment. I know she won’t have gone to the nearest drugstore; she’ll have gone to the outlet in Miami where you can get this packet most cheaply.

The first lozenge I take effects a dramatic improvement.

It’s not just the kindness. Some individuals simply know how.

They know where to shop and how to buy and when to do it.

I don’t.

G

I study the collection basket closely.

With the small flock we have at the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ, you can guess which bit of money came from which hand. There are a lot of coins (the Church is a convenient dump for pennies) and only one bill of a significant denomination, from Gert. Gert is the only regular who might be described as successful since, he has a business making para-chutes for champagne corks, so that the corks float down to widespread delight after being popped. What I admire about Gert is that he doesn’t allow his affluence to pressure him into making a large donation. His donation is often the largest, but never large.

What should you ask of your followers? It’s a question of balance I suppose, like everything else. It wouldn’t be any good demanding that they should collect aircraft engines as a path to enlightenment; expensive, and where would you store them?

But you have to ask something, there has to be an admission fee, otherwise the customers can’t see they’re getting anything.

Would you tell everyone or indeed anyone if you had discovered something valuable or important? Why?

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I love those stories about Europeans reaching America long before Columbus, and keeping quiet. It makes perfect sense: if you had found a continent rich in timber, game and fish why tell anyone outside your family? Why tell your family? Even if you had discovered something as minor as a technique for cooking the perfect burger, would you want to share it? As long as you have the technique, you have an edge; the second you share it, you’re roadkill.

Dipping into some studies in the religion section at Books & Books in an attempt to steal some ideas, I read that the early religions were like that: velvet rope. Wanting to keep the riff-raff out, initiates only. Indeed in the famous Mysteries of Eleusis, you risked death if you revealed what was in the box (which leads me to surmise there was probably fuck-all).

That’s why they were wiped out by the do-it-yourself religions.

Inevitably, the priests and salesmen have hung on, but the genius of Christianity is that it basically involves a statement of faith:

“I believe”. It’s a free gift. But the con of paying a lot of money to find out what’s in the box will always be with us.

My guess would be that the best advice is never written down or shared. Those who knew how to get things done probably kept their mouths shut and pocketed the goodies.

“A cold shower is the first step towards paradise,” I announce.

Cold showers are about right. I’m not asking too much or too little here. Sooner or later, we all have to wash. It’s not as if you have to make a pilgrimage to find a shower head. Having a cold shower is quite an effort for me, so much so that I’ve only had one in my life, and that was because the boiler had gone, I had an urgent appointment and I was filthy. I couldn’t believe how hard it was.

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“Taking a cold shower is an act of faith,” I continue. It is an act that sets you apart from those who don’t follow the doctrines of the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ. It will make you feel you are part of the elect. And it’s pocket-friendly.

Over the long term, your cold showers can save you money.

And it does, and this is important, contain an agreeable vagueness. There is a huge difference between having a cold shower in the open, in a Swedish winter, and in a balmy condo in Miami, where the cold water would be called hot in many other parts of the world.

This admonition has an agreeable vagueness for the preacher too. If the preached whine about not getting the paradisiacal benefits promised, you can always insist that there aren’t enough cold showers being taken or that the cold showers aren’t cold enough. Moveable goalposts are a great invention.

Worshippers coming in late or leaving early are a nuisance you have to get used to.

It’s irritating, but you can never expect to have everyone’s full attention; you have to play the percentages. I’m elated that a group of three has entered the church, a little annoyed that they’re doing so at the end of the service, after the collection basket has done its round.

I have just enough time to be perplexed about why two of them are carrying placards, when a booming voice bombasts:

“I am Dr Liberius Iyambo. I have come here on missionary work. You are vassals of the Devil.”

The speaker is a plump African. Late thirties. Bright purple ecclesiastical garb. It’s a church-jacking.

Dr Iyambo’s two-person mob now elevate their placards and wave them up and down to make them more potent. One reads:

“No Surrender, No Surrender, No Surrender to Satan.” Poor 171

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preplanning in the painting means the repetition squashes the word “Satan” into much smaller letters and is almost impossible to read. The other: “You Are the Cloved Hoof of Evil”.

Iyambo’s mob is one grey-haired woman, a veteran of psychiatric institutions, and a bullet-headed Latino. They barely count as backup. They’re going to stick with Iyambo, but they’re merely stage dressing, froth. Iyambo, though, is a hard case who means business. That’s the drawback to growing up in relative affluence, you can’t compete with people who grew up without shoes and only ate every other day. Iyambo is fightsome in a way no amount of training or self-denial will make me.

“You are not doing the Lord’s work,” he shrieks, pointing his finger at me in an extremely pointing way, and then at the congregation. “This is not the Lord’s work. This is an abomination. This is the work of the Devil.”

It’s flattering that he’s attempting to take over my church.