“Important?” I said. “You know what I had to endure to get here? On the bus I almost got raped by a mad Mexican named after a prison.”
“So? You have to expect these kinds of things when you take the bus.” She swung the gate open, then spun on her heels and began climbing the stairs two at a time.
“I must’ve missed that warning in the Commuter’s Guide to Los Angeles,” I said, making certain the gate was slightly ajar. I then closed the door behind me and followed her up the stairs.
Once we were in her apartment, which was so cluttered I had to kick half-empty luggage and old newspapers out of my way in order to clear a path across the floor, Heather said, “So what was so important that you had to wake me up at this ungodly hour?”
“I saw a weird newscast on television.”
“And you couldn’t tell me about it over the phone?” She entered her kitchen, which was separated from the living room by a small bar stained with Coca-Cola, bread crumbs, and grease. She began making coffee.
“This is far too important for telephonic communication, believe me. Besides, you always keep your phone off this early in the morning.”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, trying to sound as if she’d forgotten about that. “So what was so damn ominous about this news broadcast?”
“Well … I’m not sure,” I said, sliding onto a wicker stool in front of the bar. “It might’ve just been a dream.”
She rolled her eyes up at the ceiling. “Tell me the truth, you just came here for the coffee, didn’t you?”
“Now that you mention it I wouldn’t mind having a cup.”
She glared at me. “You better come up with something good quick or I swear I’ll empty this pot right on top of your head.”
I threw my hands into the air. “All right, all right, just hold on a second.” I tip-toed across the floor, navigating the room as if it were a mine field. Barely avoiding a collision with what looked like either an overturned hairdryer or a postmodern example of abstract sculpture, I switched on the television and surfed the channels until I found the local NBC news. Some tanned male bimbo going by the unlikely name of Johnny Thunder was forecasting the week’s weather with a tone of enthused desperation, as if his continued survival depended on convincing the audience that a grown man could reach orgasm by reading inaccurate meteorological predictions off a teleprompter. I wondered if he was a modern day Scheherazade, forced to reel off a thousand and one variations of the phrase “It’ll be sunny again tomorrow” in order to prevent the President of NBC from dropping him in front of a firing squad at dawn. If I thought about it long enough I could see the men in ski masks just off-screen, training their submachine guns on the weatherman at all times, thus accounting for the constipated smile affixed to his twisted, herpes-sore-pocked lips. Herpes? What? No matter how hard I tried I couldn’t seem to prevent my mind from wandering off on inexplicable thoughts. My teachers, my parents, and my therapist all tried their best to cure this disease, but alas none of them succeeded. I noticed early on that the condition was brought on by boredom but no one seemed to believe me, least of all my teachers. Nowadays they call it “Attention Deficit Disorder” and pump you full of Ritalin until you quiet down to the point of flatlining, thus leaving you in a vegetative state receptive enough for the inducement of such crucial ideas as “I pledge allegiance to the flag,” “Be all that you can be,” “Support our troops,” “Just say no to drugs,” and “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, except when it violates our right to tell you what to think” at which point Heather said, “Hello? Are you listening to me?” and I realized I’d gone off on another tangent in my mind again.
I turned my attention back to the TV screen and noticed that the weatherman had disappeared to be replaced by the press conference from my “dream.” It was real. I hadn’t been asleep. “Heather!” I said. “Get over here, they’re repeating it!”
She strolled over with a coffee cup in her hand, sipping from it as the doctor behind the podium said, “The truth is we don’t really have a clear idea what the origin of the disease is.”
Heather glanced over at me, her eyes filled with nervousness. “What disease?”
“Shh,” I said, “listen!”
“It’s important to underscore the fact that this is not a fatal disease,” the doctor continued. “After a full year’s worth of study we can firmly state that the virus affects only the humor centers of the brain.”
“Is this some kind of joke?” Heather said.
“No,” I said solemnly. “That’s the whole point.”
Heather sat down beside me on the floor. We watched the entire press conference in silence. After it was over, and the airheads who read the news had begun reciting pre-scripted ad-libs in response to each other’s pre-scripted witticisms concerning the press conference, Heather and I just sat there not knowing what to say. I felt like I was hearing the news for the first time all over again. For some reason I felt a tinge of guilt, as if I had somehow dreamed the disease into existence.
Finally Heather said, “Is this some kind of joke?” Her thought processes must have gotten stuck on one groove. “Could this be true?”
“Yes.”
“God damn it, you’re probably right. The universe really does work like that, doesn’t it?”
“It’s an odd-shaped world full of odd-shaped folk.”
Heather laughed. “I think God has a hell of a sense of humor.”
“Or he doesn’t.”
“Oh no. You think the virus affects him too?”
“I think it affected him a long time ago. I mean, Jesus fucking Christ on a pogo stick!” I said, slamming my fist into my knee. I rose to my feet and began pacing back and forth in front of Heather. “Doesn’t the whole world just make perfect fucking sense to you now? This virus has probably been around for thousands of years. How the hell do you think we got where we are today? Only a society almost totally devoid of humor could elect thirty-eight lawyers as President of the United States, right?”
“But I thought this was a new virus.”
“They didn’t say that! This is the second time I heard that press conference; I was listening carefully. They said they just discovered it, not that it was new. It could’ve been around forever, longer than the human race. Hell, maybe that’s what killed the dinosaurs in the end! The implications of this are enormous. It’s putting everything into perspective: my relationship with my father, my experiences in elementary school and high school, my disastrous failure at every honest job I’ve ever had, my inability to hold onto a girlfriend for more than three months, the reason all my friends keep stabbing me in the back. I always thought there was something wrong with me, that it was my problem, but it wasn’t. It was theirs all along. They had the virus, I didn’t. I was healthy, they weren’t. I had a sense of humor, they didn’t.”
“Don’t you think you might be jumping to conclusions just a little bit?”
“Absolutely not. Everything fits!” I stopped pacing and stood in front of the TV, slapping my fist into my palm at the end of every sentence like a mad orator standing on a bench in Venice Beach. “Think about it. Haven’t you ever had a friend, or a relative, or a lover or whatever, who you were intimate with for a long time—you were sure you knew them inside and out, right?—and then suddenly you woke up one morning and realized you couldn’t stand to even hear them breathe anymore?”
Heather raised her hand. “Like, try every boyfriend I’ve ever had.”
“There you go. Why do you think that was?”
“Because I got smart all of a sudden.”
I waved my hand in the air. “Nah, I doubt that. It wasn’t because of you at all. It was because they’d lost their sense of humor and didn’t even know it. Imagine that. If the virus infected you, how would you know? You’d probably think you were as bright and quick and witty as you ever were. You’d probably even think you were … oh my God.” Of course, I thought. “Danny. Maybe that’s why he�
��s been acting so strange lately.” I kneeled down in front of Heather. “Maybe he hasn’t sold out after all. Maybe he’s just … just suffering from a disease.” I was so ecstatic I grabbed Heather by the shoulders and shook her. “Do you know what this means?”
“Excuse me, what did you mean by ‘Nah, I doubt that’?”
“It means Danny can be cured. Maybe we can get his humor back for him. But we have to convince him that he’s sick first.”
“Are you saying I’m not smart or something?”
I rose to my feet. “C’mon, get dressed. We’re going over to Danny’s house.”
“If you’re saying I’m not smart you can get the fuck out of here right now!” Heather had shot up from the floor and was now sticking her index finger in my face. Her pale skin had darkened to a deep crimson. I was surprised by the outburst.
“When did I ever say you weren’t smart?”
“Just now. You said, ‘Nah, I doubt that.’” She imitated my voice. “The implication was clear. Listen, maybe you can get away with insulting the stooges who come to see you perform, but don’t think you can pull that shit on me.”
“I didn’t even mean it that way. It was just a—”
“A joke? Well, I didn’t think it was very funny. I don’t need any more skinny ass comedians making jokes at my expense, okay? And this isn’t a fucking virus talking, this is me, so I hope you’re paying attention.”
I raised my hands in the air, surrendering. “Jesus, okay, I’m sorry. I’m not quite sure what I’m apologizing for, but I’m sorry anyway.”
“Just as long as you don’t do it again you don’t need to know what you’re apologizing for.”
I said to myself, Okay, I’ll pretend as if that made sense. “So are you going to help me with Danny or not?”
“I don’t understand … I didn’t even know there was anything wrong with him.”
“You haven’t seen him in the past couple of days. I have. I’m telling you, he’s freaking out. He got in my face the other night at Prospero’s. I thought he was going to attack me.”
“Danny?”
I nodded. “It was totally bizarre. I’ve never seen him act like that before.”
“Well, why did he freak out? Did you tell him he wasn’t smart or something?”
I decided to ignore that comment. “He said I was jealous because he got a development deal with HBO.”
“When the heck did that happen?”
“I guess last week sometime. It seems to have really gone to his head.”
Heather smiled. “I hear Griffin’s the only one going to his head these days.”
“Yeah, well, that’s a whole nother issue. But I don’t think she’s the problem. I don’t even think the HBO deal’s really to blame. You have to come with me and see for yourself. He’s changed into a totally different person.”
She sighed. “Well, I guess I have to go. This is too intriguing to pass up, even though it means operating on about three hours sleep. I was up all night working on some new material.”
“Cool, but I don’t have time to hear it at the moment. We should leave if we’re going to—”
Heather planted her hands on her hips and gave me that stern look of hers. “Oh, I see. You don’t have time. You’re the only one who can tell funny jokes, is that what you’re subtly implying?”
“What? Are you serious? Christ, you’re way too sensitive. How’d you ever manage to get up on stage with such thin skin?”
“By ignoring jackasses like you.” She lumbered toward me with death in her eyes. For a moment I thought she was going to hit me, but then she just stormed past me and entered her bathroom, slamming the door behind her. What could she be doing in there? My mind began weaving horrible scenarios: I saw Heather bursting through the door, screaming Henny-Youngmanesque one-liners as she impaled me through the heart with the sharpened end of a plunger.
I crept over to the bathroom, pressed my ear up against the door, and listened. I could hear nothing. “Uh, are we still going over to Danny’s place?” I asked.
Heather’s muffled voice came floating through the door: “I said I would, didn’t I? Maybe if you knew how to listen better you’d be able to appreciate my jokes! Now leave me alone so I can take a shower, or would you rather I go smelling like you?”
Before I could reply I heard the shower door slide open with a high-pitched shriek like fingernails on a chalkboard, then the sound of the water being turned on. Once I’d heard the shower door slide shut again, I plopped myself down in the sofa. I wondered how long her shower would take. Probably forever. I smelled beneath my armpits. True, I hadn’t taken a shower, but it wasn’t that bad. What was Heather’s problem? Why did she always have to be so damn testy?
The doorbell rang at that moment. I opened the door to see a pair of blond, blue-eyed gentlemen in their early twenties wearing neat, no-nonsense black business suits. I thought they might be salesmen until I saw their ties. No salesman wears ties as stylish as the ones these guys had. They consisted of striking, fractal-like geometric patterns that immediately caught one’s eye. They were so colorful they almost mesmerized me … almost, but not quite.
“Hello,” one of the men said, “I’m Brother Lundberg and this is Brother Fleetwood. May we talk to you about the Book of Mormon?”
“Uh, sure, I guess,” I said, too polite to say no. Heather would’ve said no immediately. Politeness has always been my Achilles Heel.
“I’m sorry,” Brother Lundberg said, “I didn’t catch your name.”
“Elliot Greeley.”
“Hello, Elliot.” He shook my hand. “Have you ever heard of the Book of Mormon?”
“Sure, I’m very familiar with it.”
“What have you heard about it?”
“Uh … nothing.”
“Have you ever heard of Joseph Smith?”
“Yeah, that’s the name I use when I check into motels.”
“Oh?” Brother Lundberg was beginning to look a bit uneasy. “Well … Joseph Smith is also the name of the prophet to whom God entrusted the golden plates upon which the Book of Mormon was originally transcribed by God. Now, you see, Joseph Smith—”
“Where are these plates now?”
“Ah!” Lundberg thrust his index finger above his head, as if trying to poke a hole in the air. “Now, that’s a very good question, Elliot. Joseph Smith showed the plates to eleven other men, after which God took the plates back to Heaven.”
“Hey, how big is the Book of Mormon?”
“Oh, about … this big,” Brother Fleetwood said, holding up a tome as thick as a Tom Clancy potboiler.
“Jesus Christ, all that was printed on gold plates? That must’ve been a hell of a lot of plates. You know how heavy those suckers must’ve been? How’d they carry them around?”
“Well, they didn’t move around much,” Brother Lundberg explained. “It should be noted that this particular edition isn’t exactly lightweight either. It’s rather special due to the fact that both the front and back covers are lined with a thin sheet of metal to protect the words of God from the vicissitudes of Time itself.” He clicked his fingernail against the cover as if to prove his claim. It made a slight clanging sound.
“Hell, at least if you don’t like the book you can use the damn thing to clobber muggers over the head.”
Lundberg nodded. “Interesting point, Elliot. The word of God is the best weapon we have no matter how difficult the situation. Anyway, as I was saying: Do you know the two biggest problems faced by human beings?”
“I haven’t a clue.”
“We all die, and we all sin.”
“In that order?”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s bad either way. Tell me, Elliot, have you ever heard of the Holy Ghost?”
“Of course.”
“What have you heard?”
“Uh … nothing.”
“You’ve heard of a lot of interesting things haven’t you?”
“Oh, you don’t kno
w the half of it, Brother Lundberg. By the way, let me state that that’s a beautiful tie you’re wearing.” I pointed at Fleetwood’s tie. “That one’s pretty good. I mean, it’s okay, but it’s not as good as Lundberg’s here. Boy, this one’s a keeper all right, you bet. It sure is snappy. Damn near hypnotic.”
“Why, thank you,” Lundberg said, appearing to be quite flattered.
“Now, let me ask you, did you know that until just recently the Mormons claimed that once a black person accepted Jesus Christ into his heart that black person would then become white?” This is true; I read a whole report on it in the L.A. Weekly.
“Of course!” Lundberg said. “I was black myself once!” Actually, he didn’t say that. That’s just my imagination running away with me again. He said, “No, I wasn’t aware of that. But if you read the Book of Mormon you’ll learn that—”
“Wait a minute, I’m not finished, Brother Lundberg. Did you also know that Joseph Smith found the gold plates buried beneath the earth and assumed God gave them to him? How do you know it wasn’t space aliens that planted them there?”
At this point Brother Fleetwood decided to step in: “May I ask where you’re getting your information from?”
“Why, my source is that well-known expert of Mormonism, John A. Keel.”
“I’ve never heard of him,” Fleetwood said.
“He’s world famous. He wrote the book The Mothman Prophecies. Hollywood made it into a bad Richard Gere flick a few years back.” The Mothman Prophecies is Keel’s magnum opus. In fact, it’s possibly the greatest book ever written. It’s about a faceless, red-eyed winged beast known as Mothman, phantom photographers, men in fright wigs, strange flying machines, mysterious lights in the skies, ethereal gypsies, Men In Black, disappearing dogs, toxic sludge, Indian prophecies, the phone company, a collapsing bridge, a plot to assassinate the Pope, and as if all that weren’t enough you learn new ways of eating Jell-O.
Lundberg and Fleetwood stroked their smooth chins. “Hm … Elder Keel,” Fleetwood said. “That has a familiar ring to it, I must admit.”
“There you go, I told you. By the way, where do you fellas come from?”
Until the Last Dog Dies Page 6