The Gospel According to Larry

by Janet Tashjian

  I told her to take whatever time she needed. I had so much more to say, but instead of saying it, I just fidgeted with the new jar openers on the bottom shelf.

  “You better go,” she said. “My father’s coming back in a few minutes. He hasn’t been too happy about all of this.”

  I handed her the washers, all 137 of them.

  “So, we’ll talk, right?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Soon. Maybe.”

  I nodded and snuck out the door.

  I made sure no one saw me leave, then rode my bike toward the woods. Over the past few weeks, my visits had grown more frequent and extended. If this frenzy didn’t die down soon, I’d be setting up camp there permanently.

  At this rate, maybe that wasn’t such a bad thing.

  Believe it or not, it took less than two months for the book deals to kick in. Some enterprising youth downloaded all my sermons and published them in hardcover as The Larry Bible. Two unauthorized biographies hit the shelves, one entitled Josh/Larry—Flip a Coin; the other, Messiah in My Homeroom written by a girl I went to junior high with but never spoke to once. Several acquaintances from my childhood set up their own Web sites. My babysitter from Ohio, where Mom and I lived till I was four, had a popular site called From Pampers to Prophet—Josh Swensen, the Early Years.53

  One of my biggest disappointments was having to shut down the Web site. Even with the latest broadband technology, the site couldn’t handle the 255 million hits it now received per day. Worse than that, hardly anyone wanted to discuss issues anymore; the questions posted on the message boards went from “How can we live more meaningful lives?” to “Does anyone know where I can get an XL Larry T-shirt?”

  Nike, Tommy Hilfiger, Calvin Klein—all the companies I slammed in my sermons—approached me to endorse their products.

  “Does the irony escape you?” I asked the woman who claimed she was from Coca-Cola. “I trash you people for soaking us with advertising and now you want me to represent your product? What kind of philosopher would I be?”

  The word philosopher almost sent the woman into advertising nirvana. She jumped across the room. “That’s it! A heavily rotated commercial—lots of MTV play, lots of fast cuts, girls in short skirts—you’re walking down this inner-city street, philosophizing, that’s great—hip-hop music blasting in the background—trashing Coke while you’re drinking one! It’s perfect!”

  I pondered the obvious. “Won’t people think it’s strange that I’m guzzling down a product from a company whose marketing campaign I’ve detested all along?”

  “Is that what you’re worried about?” She smiled at me as if I were a two-year-old. “People don’t THINK!”

  I held open the kitchen door and asked her to leave.

  “Ten million dollars.” She smiled like the Cheshire cat. “Plus, your stepfather’s agency gets the biz.”

  These advertising people really knew what buttons to push. When Peter found out about her proposal, he played it low key but couldn’t help mentioning that the Coca-Cola account was worth more than a billion dollars a year.

  I told him I understood, but I still couldn’t do it.

  I slept under the Larsons’ porch so I wouldn’t have to deal with Peter again. I felt like a guppy hiding under a piece of coral in an aquarium full of piranhas.

  It was only a matter of time before I was swallowed whole.

  The next time I saw Beth was out behind the cemetery.54 She’d e-mailed me to meet her there to avoid the press. I had to leave my house at six in the morning in a long blond wig and fringed jacket not to attract attention.

  I thanked the universe for a few moments alone with her.55

  “I just wanted to say goodbye,” she said.

  When I asked her where she was going, she told me she was spending the rest of the summer at her aunt’s.

  “Aunt Marge, down the beach?”

  “No. Aunt Jo in Seattle.”

  “What?” Please, don’t do this to me. Please.

  “This whole year’s been crazy. I need to just be alone for a while.” She smiled. “I sound like you.”

  “But then you’ll be at Brown. I can see you there, right?”

  She pulled some dead ivy off my mother’s grave. “Look, friendship is based on honesty. And let’s face it, you were living a giant lie.”

  I cajoled, I begged, I offered a thousand excuses. She stood firm.56

  “You know me. Hypocrites drive me insane. And the world’s gone completely nuts over this. Betagold sells you out, and what does she get? A million-dollar book deal and a prime-time special. To say nothing of that stupid toothbrush she’s charging people to see.57 You’d think it was the Ark of the freaking Covenant.”

  “No one wants to talk about Larry’s message anymore,” I complained. “About how we’re wasting natural resources, exploiting workers …”

  “You don’t have to summarize Larry’s philosophy for me,” Beth snapped. “I know it as well as anyone.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “Let’s face it, Josh. Half of those rants were mine. The World Bank screwing Third World countries? I wrote a paper on that for Mr. Bartlett’s class. I’m glad you got the word out to others, but let’s not pretend you’re some kind of expert here.”

  She did that quotation-mark thing around the word expert. I felt my face redden and looked down, only to get fixated on her tattoo peeking out from the hem of her jeans. Our relationship had deteriorated so much in the past month, I would never dare to reach over and touch it anymore. Instead I asked her what happened with Todd.

  She sighed. “It was stupid to think we could be a couple,” she said. “We had nothing in common at all.”

  “We had something in common,” I said. “We should’ve been the couple.”

  “Yeah, well too late now, isn’t it?”

  I looked into her eyes, confused.

  “You’re not saying you thought about it too, are you?”

  Her lack of response sent me to my feet.

  “Don’t do this to me! After all I’ve been through, don’t pull this on me now!” I shouted. “Are you saying you wanted us to be together? All this time?”

  She concentrated on a patch of moss near the tombstone. “Just since ninth grade.”

  I stomped through the graveyard repeating the word NO over and over. “This is not happening, this can’t possibly be happening …”

  My feelings ricocheted between fury and hope, if that’s possible. Maybe we could still salvage something from all this wasted time.

  But my dream scenario barely kicked into first gear before Beth interrupted it.

  “We should just end it,” she said. “Besides, I need to get out of here. I was turning into too much of a conformist, following Larry’s every word. I’ll be better off on my own program, contributing on a more personal level.”

  She ran her hand along the top of the tombstone. “Bye, Mrs. Swensen.” She turned to me. “Bye, Josh.”

  And, just like that, the girl I had loved forever walked out of my life.

  “You can’t go!” I shouted. “We never even tried!”

  “Goodbye, Larry.”

  “I’m not Larry; I’m Josh. It’s me! Goddamn it, stop!”

  But she didn’t.

  Could I possibly be a bigger wimp? Not able to cough up enough of my real feelings until it was too late. Betagold was right. I was the worst kind of philosopher—a coward, a man (hardly) of ideas not rooted in anything real, anything from the heart. A voice inside me screamed not to let her go. But I did.

  I slumped against my mother’s tombstone, my future residence for all eternity. “Mom?”

  She didn’t answer. The only noise I heard was the distant roar of a small plane overhead. It towed a colorful banner that read LARRY DRINKS MOUNTAIN DEW.58

  I rolled over into the dirt, covered my eyes and ears like a baby. I’d lost Beth and destroyed Peter, my privacy, and my vocation, all in one fell swoop. Not much going on for Josh in th
e plus column these days.

  I stared at the brown earth until I felt human again.

  Which took me until the next morning.

  I sat on the couch and munched on my third bag of potato chips. Beth’s absence in my life left a void wide enough to drive an eighteen-wheeler through. I knew the emptiness would be with me for a very long time.

  Meanwhile, Peter had begged me to make a statement that I had come up with the pseudo ads on my own, that he knew nothing about them. I did, but that didn’t stop the backlash. He lost several more clients but refused to fold the company. One thing about Peter—he was a pro. Make it work, or die trying.

  I documented the media circus as much as I could, taking photos of the reporters taking photos of me. Even that got old after a while. Between no job and no Beth, I had nothing to do but sit around in clothes I’d worn for days and channel surf. My brain simmered in my head like overcooked squash.

  One “expert” on the Today show—a Swiss psychiatrist—interpreted the drawing of a preschooler. The picture didn’t look familiar at all, yet the gentleman explained that Josh/Larry had painted it in 1987 at the Little Red Wagon Preschool. (Some enterprising teacher had scoured the preschool archives hoping for a quick buck, I guess.)

  The psychiatrist explained that the birds and sun in the painting led him to believe that Josh/Larry had been a happy child, but the crooked window on the left side of the house pointed to an ominous future.

  I threw down my chips, dialed New York City information, and got the studio’s number. They didn’t even bother to verify if I was the “real” Larry—ratings, ratings—they just put me through. My voice bounced from the phone to the TV. “I never made those birds that look like Vs,” I told the psychiatrist. “That’s the lazy way to draw a bird.”

  Inside the television, on the other side of the room, the doctor shook his head. “Denial,” he said. “I should have known denial would be an issue, from the missing bricks in the chimney.”

  I slammed down the phone, disgusted.

  Trapped.

  Bored.

  Misunderstood.

  Overanalyzed.

  Hated.

  Worshipped.

  Friendless.

  And worst of all—noncontributing.

  I had to get out of here.

  When Gus, the mailman, dropped off the five bags of that day’s mail, I pulled him inside. I tore off my T-shirt, wrote my name on a piece of paper, and handed it to him.

  “You can get three hundred dollars for this on e-Bay,” I said. “Just let me borrow your uniform for an hour.”

  No moral dilemma for Gus; he yanked off his jacket quicker than you could say “Parcel Post.”

  With Gus’s hat pulled down over my face, I strode out of the house and past the media stationed at the bottom of the street.59 I pretended to deliver mail to the Larsons, then walked quickly to the main road.

  At the 7-Eleven, I jumped on the bus to Chestnut Hill.

  Twenty minutes later, I collapsed on the stool at the Bloomingdale’s makeup counter. I had to hurry; even in the postal uniform, I’d be recognized soon.

  “Mom, it’s all screwed up,” I sobbed. “Nothing’s changed at all. I thought I was contributing.” The new Chanel woman seemed afraid enough of my ranting to stay behind the counter.

  “Mom, tell me what to do.”

  And I did what I always did. I waited.

  Two women, each weighed down with armloads of upscale shopping bags, walked toward me.

  “Talk to me, Mom.”

  And my mother answered me loud and clear through one of these meticulously made-up women.

  “Sometimes I could just kill myself,” the woman told her friend.

  I looked up toward the ceiling. “Mom?”

  The shopaholic stood next to me and sprayed her wrist with perfume. “I’m completely serious. Sometimes it’s the only way.”

  Even my connection with Mom was gone.

  I miss you, Mom, but not enough to join you. Sorry.

  The universe, however, sent me several hints to let me know the option should at least be considered.

  First off, I went through an old book Beth had lent me—back in ancient times months ago when we were still friends. Inside, marking a page, was the tarot card of the skeleton in the boat.

  Secondly, the photographs I’d taken at the cemetery kept turning up. In my desk drawer, under my bed. I ran my finger over the prints, touching the glossy granite as if I were back at the gravesite itself. Was my name on the stone some kind of premonition? I gathered the photos together and shoved them in the bottom of my closet.

  I waited till most of the press had left for lunch, then jumped on my bike. Destination unknown, just pedaling furiously out of town in the rain.

  I’m not supposed to kill myself! Things had gotten so out of hand that even my regular communication with Mom was off. The signals crossed—she would never have given me that kind of advice.

  I pedaled for several hours, toward the ocean, toward anywhere. To prove how insane the suicide idea actually was, I headed toward the Sagamore Bridge. Several people had jumped from its heights; I’d just look and see how impossible the whole idea really was.

  Even with the rain and howling wind, I felt content for the first time in weeks. Alone at last, leaving everyone behind. For someone who coveted his privacy as much as I did, the whole Larry feeding frenzy was worse than a nightmare. The part of my life that grounded and nurtured me—my solitude—had been stolen away, leaving me with no other options to access that safe, quiet place inside. Would the brouhaha ever die down? Would I ever get my life back? As each day went by, that option seemed less and less likely.

  I’d crossed the Sagamore before but never on my bike. The wind ripped through the cables on the narrow pedestrian path. Rush hour had already begun.60 If I were going to kill myself—which I wasn’t—I’d have to pick a better time than this.

  I walked my bike toward the center of the bridge, leaned it against a piling, then looked down.

  It was a cold and scary trajectory.

  And there was NO way in the world, EVER in a million years, that I could jump off a bridge like this one.

  Part of me was happy, of course. I mean, who wants to die? But the part of me that had furiously pedaled here in the rain, that part of me felt vaguely disappointed that another option had been crossed off the list. Now that suicide was out, how was I going to get out of this mess? As dusk took over the sky, I realized the rain had stopped long ago. What I kept wiping from my eyes were tears.

  The clincher came the very next day while I sat on my bed working with Greek and Latin roots.61 Ped for “foot,” homo for “man,” to “nym” just a few. I sat with the dictionary in front of me, coming up with as many words as I could to pass the time.

  Pedestrian, homicide, pseudonym … I had more than seventy-two of them. Then, by accident—so I thought—I connected two halves that didn’t seem like a word until I looked it up online.

  Pseudo-, “false,” and -cide, “killing.” Pseudocide. To pretend to kill yourself.

  I stared at the word for a good long time. Homicide, suicide, genocide: these were words you could find in the newspaper every day. But pseudocide … I’d been through these roots a thousand times and never made this particular combination until now. (My pseudo ads were part of what had gotten me into this whole mess to begin with.)

  My mind wandered back to yesterday’s excursion to the Sagamore Bridge. Suppose I didn’t kill myself but pretended to? Would the media onslaught finally die down? Would I be able to emerge six months later when the planet had moved on to the next flavor of the month? It was something to think about, a spin on Mom’s idea that just might work. There was a world of difference between killing yourself and pretending to kill yourself, and the difference would be my life. Getting my life back by giving it up—it made about as much sense as anything else had lately.

  Pseudocide. A way to start again as someone else, to burn th
e old self and try on a new one. It’s not like I was doing the world any good being Josh OR Larry these days.

  I erased the word from my notebook; it was a word I wanted to savor, to keep to myself for a while.

  When I was little, I adored Tom Sawyer. I read and reread the part about Tom and Huck attending their own funeral—listening in while everyone sang their praises, the looks of surprise on Becky’s and Aunt Polly’s faces when the minister spotted Tom and Huck upstairs.

  Dying yet not dying.

  It was something to think about.

  The plan would have to be multilayered, of course; I mean, if someone were really going to pretend to kill himself, he’d need a new identity and city to live in, money, of course … I pulled out my laptop and began to make notes. Purely hypothetical.

  By two-thirty the next morning, I had eleven pages of ideas and three pages of research that needed to be done. I called it Project Tom Sawyer just for laughs.

  As I got ready for bed, I wondered if this was just another Josh Swensen can-this-plan-possibly-be-implemented exercise or if I was actually thinking about doing it. I didn’t need to look too far for an answer. Just like finding pseudocide in the online dictionary, the sign I was searching for came from the words themselves.

  The first pages of ideas began with he and someone.

  The last few pages all began with I.

  PART FIVE

  “For as yet they knew not the scripture, that he must rise again from the dead.”

  St. John 20:9

  The next day I jumped out of bed with my old energy—finally a new project to throw myself into. I probably wouldn’t go through with it, but I had to admit, having such a huge list of obstacles to overcome was a giant turn-on.

  I thought about the list of past lives Beth and I had made in homeroom. Forget a past life; I was ready to create a future one.

  What would be the best way to die—hypothetically, of course? Drug overdose? Street fight? No, it couldn’t be anything where a body was needed; then I wouldn’t be able to return after the whole ordeal blew over. Lost or missing wouldn’t work; the media would never give up looking for me. Everyone would need to think I was really dead. My mind continually returned to drowning. Maybe the ocean, not some lake or pond they could easily dredge.62 My recurring dream, the life jacket, the skeleton in the boat all pointed to drowning. I looked at it as a baptism of sorts.