Oh, God!

by Avery Corman

  Pretty clever. In one nice sweep, our writer tells our readers that the story is over and the public never has to buy another book on the subject now that they have his. That’s taking care of the competition.

  After our initial anger in seeing the book, as we started to read it, Judy and I began to warm to it. It was really quite funny to us, all that fantastic nonsense, and we spent the night reading sections to each other and cracking up.

  “But what should we do about it?” I said.

  “We could sue.”

  “That would only make more news.”

  “It still might discredit it,” Judy said.

  “On the other hand, it does make me out to be a very nice person.”

  “Sure. Merely a saint.”

  Then we started repeating Unes and laughing all over again until we finally fell asleep.

  God didn’t think it was so funny.

  He woke me up that night, motioning me to follow Him upstairs to the living room. I left Judy sleeping and tiptoed behind Him. He was wearing gray-striped pants, a white shirt with garters holding up the sleeves, a bow tie and a green eyeshade. He looked like a Las Vegas blackjack dealer. It turned out it was His idea of what a book editor looks like.

  “What do you call this?” He said, brandishing a copy of the book.

  “Yes, we had a good laugh over it.”

  “Hah, hah. This is black humor?”

  “Well, it’s so fantastic—”

  “You don’t come off so bad, though. The pussycat of history. Next to you Saint Francis of Assisi was the Mafia.”

  “It’s their marketing strategy. They’re doing that to sell books.”

  “You’re telling me about marketing? I got the number-one best seller.”

  “I think it’s just something we can laugh off—”

  “Listen to this.” He started to read a section He had circled with a grease pencil. “ ‘Thank you, Lord, for choosing me of all men. Thank you, the Lord said, for living a life so pure in heart and innocent in spirit.’ ”

  “Well, that’s a certain liberty—”

  “In nineteen forty-four when you stole a toy bone from the five-and-ten for your dog—was pure in heart and innocent in spirit?”

  “Nineteen forty-four?”

  “In nineteen-fifty when you felt up Barbara Gottschmidt in her living room with her mother and father sleeping in the bedroom and she said, ‘Please don’t’ and you did anyway—was pure in heart and innocent in spirit?”

  “Right, there was a Barbara Gottschmidt—”

  “In nineteen sixty-one when you took off on your income tax thirty dollars for sales tax for cigarettes when you had already stopped smoking—was pure in heart and innocent in spirit?”

  “It was a clerical error.”

  “In the years nineteen sixty-three to nineteen sixty-eight when you were a bachelor in New York and you did such dirty things with ladies I wouldn’t even want to repeat such shmutz—was pure in heart and innocent in spirit? What do you say to that? I don’t see any of that in the book.”

  My life flashed before me. It was Judgment Day. This is the way it happened. God comes to your bed, wakes you up and reads you your life.

  He continued from the book. “ ‘Even as a teenager, he felt honesty is the best policy.’ So tell me which person in this room cheated on his Spanish Regents Exam?”

  “I couldn’t help seeing his paper!”

  “ ‘Yes, he was fortunate beyond fortune to find God, but in a world of chicanery and deceit, was not the Lord lucky to find him?’ So lucky I am, I can’t stand it.”

  “I repent,” I shouted. “I repent all my sins! Judgment Day! Judgment Day!”

  “Oh, be quiet. You’ll wake your wife.”

  “It’s not Judgment Day?”

  “First, it’s night, it’s not day. Second, I don’t do judgments. This is editing we’re doing.”

  “It is?”

  “The whole world needs editing. But it’s the book I’m talking about. I circled the bad parts.”

  Nearly the entire book was circled.

  “Please understand. This is an unauthorized biography.”

  “No fooling.”

  “And of course it’s wildly inaccurate.”

  “And who is the star of the story and who is just a supporting character?”

  “It’s not quite the emphasis I would have given—”

  “Who is suddenly a celebrity with a whole book about him and who is the forgotten party?”

  “F. X. Franckks. Reverence Books. They’re the ones who did it!”

  “ ‘The Man Who Saw God.’ Before me, you were, ‘The Man Who Saw Chopped Liver.’ ”

  “I know and I’m eternally grateful.”

  “Don’t give me eternally. You don’t know from eternally. ‘Pull ourselves up by our religious bootstraps.’ That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”

  “I never said it!”

  “Tell me you don’t like the idea of a book about you?”

  “It’s so ludicrous—”

  “Tell me you don’t like the idea of being in the public library in the “B” for Biography section with Sigmund Freud and Mickey Mantle?”

  “Well, it’s a paperback. That’s not like a hardcover book.”

  “They’re putting it out hardcover—also leatherbound for the very devout.”

  “They are?”

  “So what do you plan to do about it?”

  “Maybe the thing to do is just ignore it, and let it die out on its own.”

  “Ten thousand copies a week it’s selling!”

  “Really?”

  “Outselling the Bible in some places.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Not that the Bible is such a bargain—talk about inaccurate. But I think if you want to make me feel better, you’ll disown this book.”

  “I do. I disown it very much.”

  “Not to me. To the public.”

  “But I shouldn’t get into public statements. I’ve been phasing myself out like you said.”

  “This is phasing out? This is bigger than Time. I turn my back. I go away on a little vacation—”

  “You go on vacation? Where? How?”

  “It’s very complicated. You wouldn’t understand. Anyway, I come back and see this.”

  “Listen, were you at the Whalers’ Festival?”

  “Don’t change the subject. Do something please about this.”

  “What?”

  “That’s up to you. I’m just an editor.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “If it’s not too much trouble. As I see from this book, you’re a pretty important fella. ‘Yeah, Lawd!’ ”

  And He tipped His green eyeshade and left.

  I stayed up the rest of the night worrying. When Judy woke up, I told her that God had been there.

  “Here? In Sag Harbor?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, for heaven’s sake, don’t tell anybody. You’ll kill the area.”

  “This is serious. He’s unhappy about the book.”

  “Then why did He let it get published?”

  “He doesn’t make those decisions. He’s an editor not a censor.”

  “I see,” she said, uncertainly.

  I decided to make a brief, unemotional statement to the press. I said the book was a work of pure fiction and I did not endorse it. I phoned this into The New York Times and it was absolutely the wrong decision because my statement made news, gave a giant publicity boost to the book, and sales shot up even higher. Reverence Books in their next printing even used my quote as a cover blurb with a headline: SEE FOR YOURSELF—FACT OR FICTION?

  On the day before we went back to New York, I went down to the ocean for a last swim. I had said that if God wanted me while I was away He could just show up or float me a note in a bottle. He had already shown up. This time He floated me a note. It said:

  Boy, oh boy, is someone in trouble with someone, only I do
n’t want to mention names.

  It got worse. We returned to New York to observe The Man Who Saw God rise to the top of the hardcover and paperback best-seller lists simultaneously. And the publishing industry being what it is, there were soon several unauthorized spin-offs of the unauthorized original.

  There was Miracle Claimant—a poorly written fantasy of a fantasy. “He walked through life hearing an inner voice …” It made me sound like a schizo.

  Dios y Hombre—A Spanish language quickie selling for a quarter in vending machines.

  The True Adventures of the Man Who Saw God—a comic-book version of the whole deal.

  And God’s Friend—a really sticky version that practically made it into a homosexual relationship.

  The one that floored me though was The Man Who Saw God’s Picture Album—which was actually an album of original pictures of me at various stages of my life, generously supplied the publisher by my mother.

  “Mother, those people are exploiters. How dare you give them that stuff?”

  “They gave me two hundred dollars.”

  “But you don’t need that money. And those pictures are private! That’s terrible.”

  “Terrible? How about being the only not-Grandmother in the condominium? Is that terrible?”

  “What does that have to do with it?”

  “Everybody here has pictures of babies.”

  “So?”

  “So now when they show from their children, babies—I can show from my son, a check. You work with what you got.”

  Meanwhile, the true and original F. X. Franckks’s version was going great guns and in one of the wonderful promotion reversals, who was going to make an appearance on Johnny Carson, but F. X. Franckks himself.

  F. X. Franckks turned out to be a he—a very slightly built, meek man with thin lips and a thin little voice. But what was most striking about him, considering he had stolen my life and then written a whole life that wasn’t my life, was his absolute sincerity.

  Johnny Carson asked him, “Why did you write this book?”

  “A good question, Mr. Carson, a very good question. Why did I write this book? I wrote this book because this is a glorious story, one of the most glorious in the history of Man and God, and we should not be deprived of its glorious truth.”

  “Your subject has questioned its truth, hasn’t he?”

  “That is a good point, Mr. Carson, a very good point. Why has he questioned its truth? He has questioned its truth because, as a result of his experience, he is a man so touched by grace, he is not a satisfactory judge of his own life.”

  “And how did you get the information for the book?”

  “How did I get the information for the book? I got the information for the book by talking to hundreds of people to piece together the jigsaw of a life. A clear picture emerged of a man destined by his goodness to be chosen by God.”

  Incredible. He actually believed what he had written. That’s why his piracy was so much better than anybody else’s. In his mind, it was the story of my life.

  We met once. He was standing outside the house one afternoon, waiting for me.

  “Sir?” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “Sir?”

  “Yes?”

  “I am …”

  He paused. The moment obviously held great solemnity for him.

  “I am … that is … my name is … F. … X. …” The pauses were unbearable.

  “Franckks!” I blurted out.

  “Yes … F. … X. … Franckks. And … and I am …”

  “You are?” I was in a Pinter play.

  “I am very … pleased … very honored …” John Gielgud couldn’t have delivered it better. “… to meet … you.”

  “Well, Mr. Franckks—”

  “And I just … wanted … to say … that …”

  He couldn’t make it. Overcome with emotion, he leaned forward and gave me a wet kiss on the cheek. Ick. This was a very strange person.

  16

  THE INTERNATIONAL ALL-FAITH CONFERENCE to deal with the miracle was finally shaping up and since we live in an age of shorthand, it was to be called ALLFAITH. Representatives of every organized religion in the world were to attend and they finally settled on an off-the-beaten-path site—New York City, and borrowed a hall—The U.N.

  I wasn’t very enthused about having still another judgment made of my contentions, but I figured this one was inevitable. Many people throughout the world had been waiting for a response from high religious circles before committing themselves on the miracle. So by now, the Religious Establishment was under great pressure to take some kind of position.

  I started making phonecalls to determine what role I would play in the conference, figuring a report to the delegates would be in order, or an address of welcome to the delegates, or a cocktail reception with the delegates. Very grandiose of me. I was told by the ALLFAITH events chairman, whom I finally got to after talking to the delegates chairman, to whom I was transferred by the inquiry chairman, that they had no intention of having me present for the conference. They had all the information they needed—it was a matter of sorting it out on a factual and philosophic basis and my presence would only sully the objectivity of the conference.

  It was the usual prejudice toward me of formal religious leaders. I was not yet, in their eyes, The Man Who Saw God, and during the conference I was actually to become referred to as “that person.”

  I rationalized that it was just as well for me to stay home, since my attendance there might seem to God to be some more headline-grabbing. As it was, there was no sign of Him again and I permitted myself the sacrilege of thinking He was merely sulking over the bestseller lists.

  ALLFAITH was going to be big—bigger than I would have liked, and more absolute, too. The Religious Establishment, slow to move at first, was now sweeping in with a flourish and taking center stage. They would give their verdict on the miracle. They were presuming to speak for everyone on the subject—and if you didn’t happen to practice a formal religion, well, you were about to be spoken for.

  The conference was to run seven days, presided over by a rotating committee of twenty-four chairmen, and underneath them, a delegates assembly broken down into operating units of assorted committees and subcommittees, in turn presided over by group leaders and coordinators, interspersed with multi-lingual translators, and out of this bureaucrat’s free-fall—they were going to issue The Word on The Word. The miracle didn’t happen unless they said so.

  Two thousand delegates began arriving from around the world, all “Top Brass Religiosos” as Variety put it. New York City went all out. “Welcome ALLFAITH” signs were up on windows of department stores, Horn & Hardarts, shoe stores, restaurants and the novelty stores around Times Square. Times Square itself was shaped up for the event, and under pressure from City Hall, bookstores that had been selling Butch Trade, Sex Kitten, Whip Love and other favorites, had stocked up on F. X. Franckks and Norman Vincent Peale. The grind movies that regularly showed such delicacies as The Spy Who Came in from the Pussy were now holding Bible Movie Festivals.

  There was one awkward incident, though, involving Dirty Louie, a grizzly pornie entrepreneur who ran a nickelodeon, except you put quarters in, that featured continuous performances of the sex act in every possible position by every possible combination. Dirty Louie, a purist in his art, refused to be coerced by City Hall, and his one concession was to paint over the sign on his store which said, “Girls! Girls! Girls!” and substitute it with “Nuns! Nuns! Nuns!” Inside, Louie had pictures of his girls dressed as nuns in compromised positions. The thing is, he was doing a big business when they locked him up.

  The conference had the effect of creating a religious renaissance in New York. Having all these religions assembled in one place was like having the World Series in town and you cheered for your favorite religion. Sales volume went way up on every kind of religious artifact. The people who sell umbrellas on the sidewalks were hawking bea
ds, crosses and Stars of David. Cartier’s had a special window of religious jewelry priced at over $3,000 and there was a line down the block to look at it, the kind of line that would usually attract the pretzel man, who showed up with his cart all right, but instead of pretzels, there were fifty-cent Jesus on the Cross-es and buttons that said “ALLFAITH.”

  There was to be round-the-clock television coverage by the non-commercial stations, constant spot reports and news specials on the major stations, and transmissions by worldwide satellite. It really was like having the

  World Series in town. The conference even had its own scorecard, an ALLFAITH Souvenir Program, pictures of the players.

  On the eve of the conference, Billy Graham jetted into New York to hold an open-air meeting in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, which drew an estimated 150,000 people, while Glen Campbell filled Shea Stadium with “An Evening of Spiritual Singing.”

  Opening day arrived and among the greeters were President Nixon, the Governor, the Mayor, some members of the original cast of the U.N., and there was the New York Philharmonic Orchestra and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir doing Beethoven’s Ninth, followed by benedictory prayers by each of the participating religions, which in a preview of things to come, lasted for four and a half hours.

  Once under way, the first three days of the conference were dominated by a philosophic rivalry over which religion had the truest interpretation of God. There was a parade of speakers, day and night, each using his allotted time before the delegates to champion his particular denomination’s point of view. It came across on television like a marathon sermonette.

  Meanwhile, the real work—what would you call it, miracle analysis?—was going on behind closed doors, like the back room lobbying at a political convention. Commenting on this, a New Yorker cartoon appeared showing delegates seated as if at a nominating convention underneath political-style banners saying, “Hungarian Baptist,” “Dutch Reformed,” “Serbian Orthodox.” Across the street from the U.N., Paul Krassner, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman of the original Yippies established, for their own sense of satire, a “street church” conducting services on the sidewalk consisting of readings from their church’s scriptures—the “scriptures” being news stories about the miracle as reported by the press. Under complaints from delegates to the conference, the “church” was dispersed, the Yippies claiming immunity from arrest under an American Flag and a Star of David.