Good to Be God (6 page)

Immediately, I want to help. It’s so unfair. I want to give Napalm some money for contact lenses or a haircut, some fashion tips, grooming suggestions, but I can already see he’s disqualified.

You don’t want to tournamentize, but Napalm’s disqualified.

It’s impossible he has a girlfriend. Women can get very desperate, and can be very compassionate too, but this is not on. Even paying for it, Napalm will struggle. He’s not even sinisterly or intriguingly ugly. Merely no-use ugly.

“Can I make you a coffee?” Napalm asks. All his top teeth are struggling to form one big tooth, and they are covered in a delicate yellow film.

It gives me a boost. I may have a persistent and embarrassing medical condition, but clothes cover it, and I still have a chance.

No matter how unlikely, I’m still in the game.

“I have my own business. My company produces high-end custom-made waterskis for the blingers and the jocks,” Napalm explains. “You’ve probably heard of us.”

Love the
us
. Love the
probably heard
. Truth: I have a shed where I fiddle with fibreglass. Napalm selling anything is questionable. No one with a tan, athletic ability, success at any level would tolerate Napalm’s presence in the same room. Sixto is shuffling around, anxious that Napalm will scare me away.

“Why isn’t the water boiling?” asks Napalm.

“You haven’t plugged in the kettle,” I point out. Napalm was nowhere in sight when the good stuff was handed out. But he’s still game. I admire him for that. He’s fighting when there’s no hope. That takes uncommon courage.

39

TIBOR FISCHER

The coffee, when Napalm has coaxed it into being, is terrible.

I don’t know what he’s done wrong, but it’s undrinkable. I long for an opportunity to pour it down the drain but Napalm gives me his full attention.

What galls me most about failure, is the amount of effort I’ve gone to to achieve it. I was given the manual. I followed the instructions. Shake hands firmly. Look people in the eye.

Buy your round of drinks. Help with the washing-up. Tell the truth. Keep an eye on elderly neighbours. Remember birthdays.

Be polite. Save your money. Don’t drink and drive. Recycle. It’s like getting a computer, following all the instructions, but the computer refuses to work. A computer you can at least shake, or kick around. Sadly you can’t do that with your existence.

This reflection I banish as weakness. A wobble. Be unidirectional. Towards deification. You’re well ahead of Napalm.

“Let me show you round the neighbourhood,” proposes Napalm. “Being the boss of the company, I can take time off whenever I want.” The old me would have politely agreed.

“Thanks, no. I need an early night.”

My room is completely bare and white. There’s an agreeable purity to it. A big white womb that will give birth to great things. However, Sixto may have been right about the bed. The floor is concrete and cold. A few blankets won’t do. But I want my base. I don’t want to waste money on a motel.

I take an unhinged door from the corridor, some empty paint pots and create a makeshift bed. It’s much better than it sounds, though I lie awake for hours seeking sleep.

But that’s nothing to do with the bed. I often journey through the night awake.

Revenge passes the time. I think about how I paid taxes all my life, how my parents did too. Then when my mother was 40

GOOD TO BE GOD

ill, how nothing happened at the hospital. You pay tax, and you get nothing. No, that’s not true, you get shit. I ponder how my bosses didn’t like me taking time off to look after my mother.

How that helped get me fired.

I think about revenge. Pointless weakness. I strain to submerge the thought. Be unidirectional. But the rage bobs back up time and time again. My guts are fermenting. I fart rage. I can’t stop thinking about how I’d like to have half an hour with my former bosses and an iron bar. Revenge colonizes our thoughts. Stories on television, at the cinema, in books, they’re usually about revenge. Why so much about revenge? Because in reality it never comes to pass.

I abandon consciousness wondering whom I would track down and kill first if civilization collapsed.

G

I wake up early, beaten. What am I doing here? Sleeping on a door, far from home, wanting to fool everyone that I’m God.

I pray. I pray because there’s nothing else. I don’t pray for myself. I pray for everyone. I pray that God will set everything right. Save me, sure, but save everyone else. Why do we have to go through all this? All this… and all this… all this… trampling?

Unluckily for me, deep down, I’d like a world with a smattering of justice.

In the bathroom mirror, I inspect my face. To regular observers of Tyndale Corbett there’s no doubt he’s cracking up. “Portrait of a man about to go pop” could be the caption. I plant myself on the toilet in an attempt to jettison the hopelessness.

Napalm’s waiting for me in the kitchen. “How about some coffee? I do great waffles.” I have to laugh.

41

TIBOR FISCHER

“Thanks. But I have a meeting.”

I need to get plotting. A full stomach is the best start to plotting. I get in my car to locate an expensive breakfast. As I hit the ignition, a black youth, stripped to the waist, cycles past, handlebars unused, because he’s using his hands to snort something. I admire him because he’s having fun. The bike is so shoddy it couldn’t get stolen, and his trousers are rags, but he’s relaxed. It’s all about attitude. It really is. If you don’t care, you don’t care.

On my way over to Ocean Drive, I again briefly consider suicide, but as I tuck into my eggs benedict in the sun, my spine reforms. I need to draw up a business plan for becoming God.

How? How fast? How best? Should I concentrate exclusively on getting divine, or should I make some money? Even with a liberal application of frugality my funds won’t last more than a few months.

I have to get on with it.

At the table on my right a very ogleworthy woman gets up.

She’s mid-thirties, a soupçon of time-inflicted sourness, but still confidently publicizing her breasts. She has the same travails as Napalm: doubt, betrayal, loneliness, dry skin. But she’s travelling first class. This is what is so unfair. She may die alone and miserable, but it’s unlikely. I’ve known some beautiful women who were unhappy, some inexplicably unhappy, but I haven’t known any who were alone or poor.

Fumbling with her purse, she spills some coins which spiral all over the ground. I retrieve two quarters for her that have rolled to my feet. It’s a great opportunity for conversation. We could meet up somewhere for a drink or a meal, get to know each other, hit it off, tumble into bed; but then where would we be?

Without paying, I smile and walk off.

42

GOOD TO BE GOD

G

Finding work isn’t so easy.

Without a work permit, the choice isn’t so great. And even if I can get some fake ID, it always takes time to find a job. But I want to be doing something. I know how easy it is to drown in yourself.

In a T-shirt shop selling rubbish to tourists, I almost get work, but the missing staff member turns up just as the cash register is being explained to me. After two days of tramping around. I find myself in a small shack on an unfashionable section of the beach, selling refreshments.

I open up, feeling good. The weather is overcast and, for Miami, cool. I’m in charge of three tubs of ice cream, some water, coke and some burgers and buns. I have five dollars in change and was left by the owner, a Mr Ansari, to whom I gave a deposit of fifty dollars, with the injunction that if I cheated him he’d find me and kill me.

There aren’t many people around. After forty minutes, a stubby woman with a five-year-old child turns up. That I only have three flavours galls her. She’s ugly, and I’ve noticed this with the ugly, because they’ve had so much shit, they tend to go to one extreme or the other; either they become very jolly, or they don’t.

On top of that, there is nothing more ruthless than a mother with a small child. This is a working mother, on her day off, swindled by the weather. Exasperated about the lack of flavours.

After consulting her kid, she asks for some pistachio.

I reach for the new tub; opening a new tub is strangely pleasurable. I reach for the scoop, and then encounter a problem.

The ice cream is hard, completely immune to the scoop. Even with straight-from-the-freezer tubs I can usually tease off some 43

TIBOR FISCHER

shavings. But not this pistachio. I don’t know what they did with this tub, but it must have been involved in some extreme refrigeration activities for years.

I smile. Always smile. “It’s really hard,” I say to the mother in the hope that she’ll acknowledge my predicament and say “we’ll come back in ten minutes”. She doesn’t. I decide to put the tub on the hotplate for burgers, but either the hotplate doesn’t work or I don’t have the ability to switch it on. I push the scoop as hard as I can. The scoop gets a slight veneer of grease. I push again until I sweat. Is this stuff really ice cream?

The mother watches me with contempt. This is worse than being shouted at. This isn’t my fault, but it might as well be.

“Where’s the ice cream?” the kid asks predictably.

“The man’s just making it for you,” the mother replies. This is what’s interesting about kids. They believe. They believe the man’s making it. They believe we can fly.

I push the scoop so hard my vision goes, and the scoop buckles.

Out of curiosity, I examine the other two tubs. Like rock. I smile at the mother. There we are, attendees at an unfortunateness.

G

My mishap with the ice cream persuades me not to mess around any more. I need to get on with my mission, and to trust that money will come from somewhere. Unidirectional.

Pondering how to give off hints of divinity, it occurs to me that a house of worship would be rich in believers and where God-grade actions would be appreciated (I’m not wasting my time trying to persuade people who don’t even believe in God).

I hang out in a few local churches to get a picture of piety in Miami and I can see that the mission won’t be at all easy.

44

GOOD TO BE GOD

If you want something, you can work hard to create or to earn it, to assemble it day by day, week by week, year after year, or you can go out and steal one someone else made.

The big churches are well organized, they have skilled pul-piteers. Like any successful business they are well placed to repel boarders. St Mary’s Cathedral puts on a great show, but it would take me years to work my way through the ranks. It’s the pyramid scheme all over, you have to pay before you get. And I suspect that the Catholic Church would be rather upset about God turning up and wilting their authority.

The smaller congregations, on the other hand, seem too nutty, too poor to bother hijacking, but are also quite jealously controlled by cult masters.

I spend an afternoon strolling down the Miracle Mile in Coral Gables. No one I talk to knows why it’s called the Miracle Mile, but then it’s very likely the staff in the shops I browsed in have only been in Miami a month longer than me.

The Miracle Mile is a row of glitzy shops, but has nothing out of the ordinary about it. Would it be too corny to simulate a miracle on the Miracle Mile? On the other hand the copy would be prewritten for the journalists. I’ve got to make my act press-friendly.

Turning off the Miracle Mile, I saunter into Books & Books, which I assume is a bar with an odd name, as a bar is what greets you in the courtyard, until I see they also do books. Are there any short books about becoming God?

As I’m hot and tired, I sit down and order a drink instead.

The walking’s drained me, and I also spent the morning thrashing the punchbag Dishonest Dave supplied. With Sixto’s permission, I fixed a screw into a tree branch in the garden, and hung the punchbag.

45

TIBOR FISCHER

I’ve never had a go at a punchbag, but immediately discovered I had a vocation for violence. I beat that punchbag senseless.

Punches, jabs, elbows, roundhouse kicks (in a lame, forty-something way, but it was fantastic). I couldn’t believe how much I enjoyed hitting it. I was enjoying it so much I was certain someone would come and stop me.

My vocation for violence is, however, a vocation for violence against the inanimate. I’ve had two fights in my life. The first was at school when I was six. One kid had swapped my new chair for his crappy chair. I was tugging back my chair, when the teacher spotted us. Instead of stopping us, she said, “Go on then, slug it out.” I won and got my chair back, but I wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy because I’d discovered I was in a brawn-ruled world.

My beer is served by a tall blonde. Generally, I have no interest in attractive barmaids, because the standard attractive barmaid has no interest in me, and attractive barmaids are constantly accosted by glibber, more appealing or more obsessed customers than me.

The poise of hot barmaids makes them as approachable as a mountain peak. But this barmaid fumbles over every order, which makes her more charming. Her unrevealing attire also suggests she must be some grad student who started on the job fifteen minutes ago. She’s friendly and conscientious not because she’s being paid to be, but because she is.

Dedication is sexy. I hate laziness and sloppiness. We chat and I get a wobble. Suddenly, I get a burst of loneliness, and my uni goes off in another direction. I want a life with the barmaid, to take some poorly paid job in a warehouse that wouldn’t matter because I’d be with her.

“Any chance you’re free for dinner?” I ask not with any expectation of success, but because if I don’t ask the regret will be a stone in my shoe.

46

GOOD TO BE GOD

“Hey, if I were single…” she says. I suspect this isn’t true, but it’s a decent way of saying no. That future has gone to where all the other unused futures go. I’m surprisingly undeflated.

The wobble’s over. But if you’re not too bothered about the no, you’re not too bothered about the yes.

I briefly scan the section on religion, but there’s no book clearly marked “How to Fool Everyone You Are God” and so I give up.