If All Else Fails (17 page)

If she had hit her
head more often, if she had let it hang out the window when she was driving her car. If insects
had smashed into her mouth, I would have loved her more; I would have found her a better place to
park.

Being in her
presence was ultimately frustrating. It was like being aware of Custer's funeral, a hundred years
too late to attend and a hundred years too soon to take a stand, saying, "Though unable to
attend, I would like to leave word that I approve." It was like successfully training a mad dog
to bite by choice not chance and then discovering that all your enemies had died in an eclipse of
the moon so thor­ough it registered
ix
on the Richter scale. It was
like being a
turkey at Thanksgiving and
having to be so stuffed with thankfulness that it hurt right down to the bone. It was like
brotherhood, hugging infectious lepers and kissing cancer sores.

Jesus Christ was
the kind of woman who wanted to be ev­erywhere and everything to everybody. (She slept around is
what I'm trying to say.) Her feet were so big she could fast-talk you into anything with them.
(The old jokes have it that the red stuff between her toes was slow Indians.) She was
overwhelming and she almost overwhelmed me. I admit it, I was almost compromised. On me, with the
chains, lynch ropes, and beaded castration complexes, she tried harder. She gave me the deluxe,
the Jesus Christ with everything on it and anchovies. I mean, she was all over me with
true-pieces-of-the-cross fingernails, but I never let her into my bathroom. I may have slept with
her, I may have mounted her for Lent, but I never let her into my bathroom. (If you do not sense
a victory on my part at this point in this narra­tive, I will have to.)

I've put up with a
lot. Yes, I have. I've put up with the white man's Indian-land fetish (the
I-Can't-Get-To-Sleep-Unless-I-Have-Indian-Land-Under-My-Pillow bit.) I've moved gracefully
wherever I was told to move. But I draw the line at the bathroom. Any movements I make in the
bathroom are strictly my own. I'm not here to do motion study on your bowel movements, I'm here
to move mine. To do it as my ancestors have done it before me (and some­times behind me and off
to the left a lot, now that I think of it. It was always best to do it downwind).

I didn't complain
when Jesus Christ sang six choruses of the NEW YORK TIMES REVIEW OF BOOKS FIGHT SONG in the
sacred sun altar. I kept my peace when her brother, down from Harvard for a weekend, bought FIRST
AMERICAN SERIAL RIGHTS on my sister, but I broke her camera when she followed me into the
bathroom.

I had told her over
and over again that I didn't mind the coming of Jesus Christ as long as she left us with our own
silverware when she left and didn't wipe her hands on the toilet seats. I wouldn't have cared one
way or the other, if she wanted to have a second coming, if she'd stayed out of the bathroom when
I was in. I kept telling her, while I'm in there, I prefer to worship Jesus Christ sitting down
by myself. (You have to keep something sacred.)

No matter how long
I sat in there, religiously straining in her name, no matter how exclusive I tried to be about
her, she always got in somehow. She oozed through the walls like a secret blessing. Her presence
was more deeply felt, in­deed seemed much more natural, in the bathroom than on any other place
on the reservation.

Her eyes seemed to
genuflect from the bottom of the sink. Often we heard her laughter harmonizing with the gurgle of
the toilet. The flush went deep into the earth on a gush, so cross your heart and hope to die,
the plumbing seemed blessed. The stool reminded me of you, Miss Jesus Christ, as a lover. The
plumbing, the beads of condescension on the pipes, the wisecracks in the bathroom tile, the
essence of all these things dripped you, yes, you. Miss Jesus Christ. You were busted and
disgusted and put away wet.

As a lover, Jesus
went at it as if there were no tomorrow and, what's worse, often as if there were no yesterday
either. It kept me pregnant and happy and in the kitchen. It kept me constantly defused. I could
never tell if I was blushing or cooking. Sometimes I was both and it was my life's work. That's
what Jesus said but momentarily, a narcissistic tend­ency in her, had mistaken me for some other
sex, you know, the other sex, the one Jesus Christ created in Genesis. Jesus divided people into
the good guys US and the bad thems, THEM. (PITY, PITY, I SAY. OH THEM, OH US! Did we ever really
happen? Weren't we all once US and burdened
with no THEM? Did we ever really happen or was it all just a dream, long ago, and
faraway?)

I remember when
Jesus Christ and I had our first lover's quarrel. It was on one of those days when the world is
try­ing to be new all over again and you don't feel like wearing a shirt to church. One of those
days when fishing in the creek seemed more religious than a single-breasted suit and a prayer
book opened to page one. One of those days. I'd been talking to my brothers, the animals,
breathing with the green things and I'd been late for the predawn mass. Jesus was infuriated. She
noticed my absence when they passed around the collection plate and she was enraged. She said,
using her best Sermon on Mounting voice, "If you don't love me faithfully, you'll have to go to
jail where sadistic choir­boys will beat your naked behind with leather whips."

I listened to this
and, having thought it over carefully, I couldn't resist the chance to be a pioneer and I went.
Went to jail that is. The naked choirboys were civil service em­ployees. The leather whips were
made out of chains and solitary confinement.

Jail as a means to
my end was full of high culture and Christian charity. Food poisoning was one of the highest
arts, but the jailer didn't do anything about it until I col­lapsed in the middle of the night
and saw a nightmare figure riding a dead horse and cashing checks under an assumed name. It was
hell there until I recognized myself.

Jesus Christ sent
her love from some missile silo deep within the center of the earth. I got a complimentary Bible
that was autographed by Jesus Christ personally and fea­tured color foldouts of the sacred cities
of Jerusalem and Detroit. There was also a glossary that featured a debate be­tween two biblical
scholars on the exact location where Jesus Christ, in her infinite wisdom, will give the Earth an
enema on Judgment Day. Personally, I favored Pasadena since it was an already well-known parade
route.

Jail made my
toenails grow inward like little knives of lost meaning and dampened my eagle of freedom's
enthusiasm for flying. The prison doctor, fresh from a course on refur­nishing electric chairs in
vinyl, was above art. He thought at first that I had a social disease which would have raised my
stature among the rapists in the cellblock. But, eventually, he found out that I was imprisoned
not for having a social disease but because I didn't have one. I had caught the cure, not the
disease. When it seemed obvious to him that there wasn't going to be any money in it, the doctor
went home and waited for the local funeral director to call and complain about my failure to
provide him with state-sup­ported employment.

I remember the
lip's corruption, the gossip that used to vomit through the ventilator shafts and I was in there,
how long, I forget. A long time, I know, and the rapists taught me card tricks and ate my food
for me. I think I remember two cells and I know we had to stand on the John (the baptist) in the
last cell and look through the ventilator pipes to plan our defense. When I speak of we, I am
talking about Jesus Christ who went right into jail with me. She went as a guard and my lawyer.
She also moonlighted as torturer and when the state could get it up enough to ever get around to
doing an execution, she filled in as executioner, too. I'll say this much for Jesus Christ. She
was no quitter.

I lived very low to
the ground and Jesus Christ was right down there with me. She used to step on my hands with her
dancing shoes when I scrubbed the floor of the cell. I kept all the hand grenades the Bible
society sent underwater in the sink, and I never told her about the crazy letters I wrote to THE
GREAT SPIRIT C/O SANTA'S WORKSHOP, NORTH POLE, EARTH. Sometimes I saw her riding the backs of
insects that were so overwhelmed with brotherhood they came and slept in my bed with me.
Sometimes.

I don't want you to
think I went to jail without a trial. I
had a very nice trial. Not too gaudy, not too cheap, just a nice trial slightly
reminiscent of the Spanish Inquisition (nothing like a well-developed sense of history and
carrying on traditions). It was a two-part inquisition, with one part being the legal one in the
courtroom and the other part that came before court. The one where they pounded all the clues out
of me with nightsticks on the way to the police station.

The judge and the
trial. The judge was made out of old rubber bands, and when they unplugged the air conditioner
they found it was powered by no volts coming from his heart or something fearfully poetic like
that. He was an or­dained minister, a surfboard clergyman, so named for his ability to hang
ten.

The trial was a
jumble with three witnesses for Jesus Christ popping up like junk mail, each saying, I COMMIT­TED
ADULTERY. After each man had given that fact away, the judge said ONE OF THESE MEN IS THE REAL
MAN WHO COMMITTED ADULTERY. THE OTHER TWO ARE IMPOSTORS AND WILL TRY TO STUMP OUR PANEL OF
EXPERTS. The jury asked each of the men questions and then cast dice to see who was the most
likely of the three men as far as adultery goes. (Per­sonally, I was rooting for the guy with the
handbag and high heels. I had hoped he had made a breakthrough.) That was my trial. Perhaps I am
confusing it with a television game show. When you fall in love with Jesus Christ and then out of
it, things get confused and blur altogether. Just last week, I sat on myself, mistaking me for a
chair. We blur, we blur.

My sentence was
not, as the master of ceremonies had promised, two weeks in Bermuda with your choice of sins and
all expenses paid. I got all the centuries expected to occur at hard labor and a recommendation
for no parole, ever. It was a life sentence with the stipulation that it could be changed if they
could think of something more permanent. I've served two centuries already with many others of my
own kind. We blur, we blur.

Well, I'll say this
much for Jesus Christ. She had me by the short hairs for a while. She had me foxed. I didn't even
know I was living, baby. But I found out and I took it away with me and I got my revenge on Jesus
Christ. I got my re­venge when the heavy, wooden beam in the building I was knocking down,
collapsed and drove an iron spike through my shoulder.

I felt like a
returning war hero (or a movie stunt man) with all that blood pouring out of my crucifixion
wound. I didn't have my going-to-church shirt on and it was so much better that way. All that
skin showing and that enormous hole, three inches deep, big enough to bake blackbirds in, the
doctor later said. And the blood (not of the lamb but of the wolf) that I didn't even know I had,
never expected it was there, until I spilled it, the glorious blood! Every step I took, my heart
pumped out more blood and I knew I was human. It was news to me. I used to know it, I guess, but
loving Jesus can make you forget the damnedest things.

That blood, my
blood in a stream down my arm and across the fingers, scarlet drops to the ground, that's what
changed me, made me see Jesus Christ as the Jesus Christ she was the Jesus Christ of. I had been
dying on the floor of my cell, alone at night and Jesus Christ was standing just outside the
cellblock, playing five-card draw with the guy who brought the girlie magazines, all because I
didn't know I was alive. I had been thinking about Jesus Christ, saying, "I should have married
her and saved myself from all this grief and adopted her offspring, which seemed to be a French
Poodle named Theodore."

Under the influence
of Jesus, gaily jogging through my life in the sweatsuit she wore at Bible College, I know I
remembered thinking about wanting to reform for her sake but my memory of that is short. My
memory used to be
quite long but I cut
part of it off and used it for a bookmark. I put it in the pages of a book I had been writing
that said, in case somebody was watching, JESUS CHRIST I LOVE YOU AND CAN I PLEASE GO HOME. If I
had reformed it would prove I hadn't really grown up yet, and never in­tended to. It would have
meant I was turned around inside and wanted to blur. To blur, to blur. If I had reformed, it
would have meant the crank I used to turn myself around inside had broken and I was stuck the way
I was and would always be.

But I had been
spiked, crucified, taught that pain makes its absence worthwhile when the building fell. That was
the secret. The buildings have to fall and the blood has to flow and we have to go around
unreformed and nobody making apologies. Because, baby, we want to know we are living.

Maybe I'm still in
jail, maybe I'm still sitting in the cell, typing mechanically about all the events that happened
but can't be revealed until all the cockroaches of freedom I've tied up in bandages have died
with the threat of freedom on their lips. Maybe I sit here wondering how long the supply of
bandages will last and whether or not (out of sight, out of mind) Miss Jesus Christ still thinks
about me, wonder if she remembers the day when, well, there were so many, many days, yes so many.
And the nights. Somebody ought to tell her that I can bleed. Somebody ought to tell her. I've got
a down deep gut feeling that that is one thing she never knew. Never.