“He was here at 6.12,” says the Hierophant. “He could feed a thousand people if they turned up at 6.12. You can have almost anything you want. One time he even had caviar and freshly buttered toast. But woe betide those who come at 6.16.
Some say he hates handing out food and some say he hates the unpunctual.”
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Hector had been in the open sea for two weeks on a raft from Cuba that had gone badly off course. He had been moments from death when he made a deal with the Santeria divinities: save me, and every day for the rest of my life I’ll feed anyone who needs it. He was picked up by a fishing boat at 6.12 p.m.
within a minute of making his pact.
“He kept his vow,” says the Hierophant. “But you have to with the Santeria divinities. They won’t take any shit. I don’t even believe in them, and they scare me. So Hector gives generously every day, though of course some also say that, while he gives generously every day, he never promised exactly how long he’d be generous for every day.”
I’ve been with the Hierophant now for over a month and I have to say I don’t really understand what his church is about, or rather how it differs from the mainstream churches, apart from the fact that it’s his church. He’s had a new leaflet printed with the catchy strapline “Affordable paradise: what are you waiting for?” I suggested handing out some of the leaflets along with the food, but the Hierophant wouldn’t let me.
“That’s cheating,” he said. “They know who I am if they want to find out more.”
The turkey subs are welcomed. The easiest way to spot the homeless or mad in Miami is to keep an eye out for winter clothing; those boys love to overdress (and it is mostly men, another testament to womankind). There are some old guys who badly need the food, some younger guys newer to destitution who are cooler about it; but it’s pleasant to do something helpful.
“Nice shoes,” says a simple-looking guy to me. My shoes aren’t especially fine, but you forget that you can sink to the point where an unruined set of footwear looks good.
A very tall black man comes up to me. I immediately christen 73
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him the Prophet. He’s wearing a headdress and carrying a magnificent walking stick, made out of some dark, gnarled wood. His clothes are ripped up so regularly you’d say some garment-grater had been at work. Sunglasses, and his most distinctive feature, a gas mask, hide his face. I doubt this is to protect himself from his stench, which pokes me in the eyes, since one of the great mercies of existence is that you’re immune to your own fug. I’d say the gas mask comes under the heading of inappropriate concern; when you have no job, no money, no home and only an approximation of clothing, car fumes shouldn’t worry you.
He is incredibly straight-backed though, which makes me push my shoulders back. The years accumulate a stoop on us. I pass him a turkey sub. He stares at this, perplexed, as if I’d given him a clockwork rabbit.
The turkey sub is very simple – turkey, lettuce, tomato, butter – but quite good if I say so myself. A white guy with an afro who’s sporting a black overcoat (although he’s naked underneath) asks me what it is.
“Turkey,” I respond.
“I want ham,” he says. I wonder if Christ had this problem with the fishes and loaves, the crowd at the back asking for cheese or spare rib.
There is a part of me that yearns to say, in the style of my erstwhile employer Mr Ansari, “Take the turkey or I’ll kill you.” But I can’t do that. I hand him another turkey sub, which is wrapped up so tight you can’t see the turkey. “There you go,”
I say. He walks off without opening it. Tell the hearers what they want to hear. It may not work for long, but it does work.
Only one of the recipients expresses thanks. “Great sub,”
he says. Young guy, doesn’t look homeless, he looks more like 74
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a student who’s stayed out late. “Hey Fash,” shouts the shoe-admirer, “let’s go. Let’s go.”
I’m surprised to see Dishonest Dave approaching us, and he’s a little surprised to see me.
“He’s not here,” says the Hierophant to Dave. As I suspected, Dishonest Dave is one of those people who knows everyone.
I sense from Dishonest Dave’s posturese he doesn’t want to talk about why he’s here. So I don’t.
“How are you?”
“Doing good. All going to plan?”
“Fine,” I say. The Hierophant has ambled off to issue the last subs. “There’s one thing I wanted to ask you. Do you know any corrupt doctors?” I’m confident Dishonest Dave will have a couple on the books.
“No.” He says. He then says nothing more. I feel he has said this too quickly. I want at least to hear something like, “Let me have a think…” or “Maybe…”.
“You don’t know any corrupt doctors?” In one way, you sound stupid asking the same question again, once it’s been unequivocally answered, but I have found that asking the same question three or four times on occasion can get you closer to the answer you want.
“No,” says Dishonest Dave, torpedoing my first attempt at a miracle. “Let’s go for a drink some time.”
G
Developing my deification has to be my top priority now. I’ve established myself as a mysterious, austere figure, who doesn’t drink, smoke, shoot up, chase women or boys; who hardly eats (in witness-heavy circumstances). Calm, patient, willing 75
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to clean windows and to hand out leaflets. A great sitter in church. Wholly holy.
God-grade worship starts with miracles. A few discreet, not too publicized miracles would get me going.
Curing the sick is a standard one. Curing Esther would be great, but for the problem I can’t do it, and even I wouldn’t want to engender any false hope. Curing the sick is in fact a very tough one. You see cripples bounding out of their wheelchairs or tumour sufferers boasting of remission, and a part of me thinks, well, I could be wheeled into a mass and then jump up, and as for the genuinely sick getting better, they do that all the time, despite the doctors (although not, apparently, if you have a persistent and extremely embarrassing condition like mine).
But healing is a real crowd-pleaser.
The easiest way to get rid of an illness, is to get rid of one that isn’t there. What I need is a sufferer, what I need rather than a straight fake who might flake, is someone upright, someone for whom the tumour is real and who will then love the cure.
Persuading someone they’re terminally ill is cruel and largely unforgivable, but not if you do it to a banker or a lawyer.
What I need is a morally depleted doctor who, when some unsuspecting banker or patient he hates comes in with a sniffle or rash, persuades him (and it will have to be him – no women, no kids) to take some tests. The test results are tweaked to be disastrous; more tests are done with equally doom-laden results. Then in steps a mysterious, austere figure recommended by the doctor as a spiritual counsellor. Hey presto. I must talk to Dishonest Dave again about his medical acquaintances.
I go downstairs where two attractive girls are mopping the floor. They are wearing skimpy bikini bottoms, and nothing 76
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else. It’s the scenario that you long for when you’re sixteen but you’ve given up on by the time you’re forty-something, because you know it’ll never happen, and even if it did you wouldn’t be able to do much about it.
“Are you the holy guy?” one asks.
It’s working. I’m pleased that I’m radiating, but I’m blowing it by gawping at their breasts. However, they are unembar-rassable.
“Sixto told us about you,” says the other. Bearing in mind the work I carry out for Sixto, I fear he’s having a laugh. “Do you really sleep on a door? I’m Trixi and this is Patti.”
In order to preserve my holiness, I retreat back to my room.
Later, when I’ve heard them leave, I return to the kitchen to fix a snack.
“Sixto, I’ve just met your cleaners,” I say when he appears.
“Yeah, I’m furious about that.”
“Why?”
“I told Patti she could clean up. I didn’t ask her to bring a friend.” Patti, Sixto elaborates, is the younger sister of his girlfriend, who had been hassling him month after month for some blow. Sixto judged it immoral to sell cocaine to his girlfriend’s younger sister. He judged it immoral to comp her even one line. But because she was so relentless, he agreed to let her earn some by doing housework.
“To instil the work ethic, you know?” Sixto had been taken aback when Patti had shown up with Trixi. He had also been taken aback when they stripped to keep their clothes clean.
“Man, I told them to put their clothes back on. I fucking begged them. But no, they were too worried about their clothes getting grungy. And you just don’t have any authority when you’re talking to fifteen-year-old breasts.”
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“Fifteen?”
Sixto inspects the ground. “Why did I do her a favour? Why did I want to help her out?”
I have visions of twenty topless fifteen-year-olds fighting over the right to clean the hob for a toot. The whole school rolling up.
It’s hard to be bitterly disappointed when you’re forty-something, because you have basically given up. But I do have that one-step-forwards, ten-steps-backwards sensation. I can’t conceive of any anger-diverting way of Sixto explaining to his girlfriend how her younger sister scouring his surfaces, coked-up and naked (and that’s how it will be in his girlfriend’s mind, it won’t be any use him highlighting the bikini bottoms as mitigation) was originally a disciplinary measure. We’re down for one of those five-hundred-year sentences in maximum security. This is what happens when you do favours.
Driving over to join the Hierophant, I consider how all these white-powder escapades could put an uncorrectable dent into my plans. I can’t believe we haven’t been arrested yet. It’s Friday afternoon. The cops will probably wait till Monday morning.
What can I do about it? Nothing.
I meet the Hierophant at the public swimming pool. The Hierophant did three tours of Vietnam (they wouldn’t let you do any more) and gets some military pension, so he could be taking it easy in a trailer somewhere less chic in Florida, hooking marlin and so on, but he ploughs most of his money into the church and has this part-time job at the pool working the ticket desk. His energy is remarkable, especially since I doubt the job pays enough to buy a newspaper.
Three rotund middle-aged ladies buy tickets. “Where are you from?” asks the Hierophant, because, naturally, they won’t be from Miami. “Toledo,” says one.
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“Do you pray hard in Toledo?”
The Hierophant is wearing a T-shirt with the inscription
“Work Harder – Millions of People on Welfare Are Depending on You” and a baseball cap. Some wear a baseball cap because of fashion or because it is the badge of a certain group. The Hierophant wears it because it’s cheap, useful headgear.
A woman comes up, carrying one kid, with four others, two very young, in tow. She’s horribly poor. She has to spend the whole day counting her money and recalculating her purchasing possibilities.
“Hi,” she says. “Do you have a family rate?” Of course, there isn’t one. The misery is caked on her. Her husband died somewhere struggling to make money in some foreign shithole, no insurance, leaving her with the creases of widowhood.
They’ve driven for days to have a holiday, to stay on someone’s floor. That’s why there’s so much stuff about being kind to widows and orphans in scripture, because it’s so fucking awful.
You get a taste of how hard life can be, and you also know that an insight like that is of no benefit, it’s like stepping into a squishy turd. You just want to wipe it off.
The Hierophant lets them in for the price of two kids. I’m proud of him. No one has been done out of anything. It was a little wink of decency.
“Everyone has a breaking point,” says the Hierophant, “and everyone’s wrong about where it is.”
This is what’s funny; the characters who go on about caring for others are nearly always the most selfish. I had some dealings with the union reps at work and they were all, almost without exception, the most greedy, self-centred and vile types you were ever likely to come across. You should see their expenses. Beware talk of brotherhood and justice. Whereas those, like the Hierophant who 79
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trumpet the stand-on-your-own-two-feet creed are the most likely to give you a hand…
G
I wake up with the dawn and I pray hard.
I pray hard for everyone. I don’t even pray for myself. That’s how pure my prayer is. I’ve been praying hard for some time, begging unashamedly for a better world, because I’m appalled by the one I’m in and I haven’t noticed any difference. It occurs to me that probably many others have been on the beseeching trail; surely if prayer had any effect we’d have noticed? On the other hand, just because something doesn’t work for you doesn’t mean it’s not working somewhere else. If I had to start a fire by rubbing twigs, I’d be nowhere, and I’d have some chance of pulling off a stunt like that.
Breakfast restores my spine. How confidence-rich a doughnut can be, how character-forming coffee. Time for a miracle. Time to radiate.
The Hierophant needs to be seeded with intimations of my supremacy. He will serve as the chief witness of my divinity, so he has to be fed some amazing information, so first I need some amazing information.
I grab myself a terminal at Kafka’s, and see whether there’s some good stuff on the net. I immediately find an interview with the Hierophant conducted by a Virginia Hawthorn, the journalist at the Lama’s talk. She’s evidently hot on religion. I mark her down for cultivation.
Then I drive over to the Church of the Heavily Armed Christ, where I sweep up, even though since I swept up yesterday, there’s nothing to sweep up. I leave a terrifically phallic blue pen on a 80
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top shelf in the Hierophant’s office, which should garner me amazing information.
The next day, I arrive early to filter the mail, in case there’s any amazing information. Sadly there is no letter informing the Hierophant of a visit from a long-lost friend or relation.
There is no news of a large fortune bequeathed to him. There is nothing that could be even considered respectable information.
There are bills and ads for gardening equipment, and since I’ve opened the envelopes clumsily, I have to ditch all the mail to conceal my tampering.
I then plug in to my pen, which can record up to eight hours of conversation. The trouble with recording up to eight hours of conversation is that you then have to listen to it. The material is as junk as the mail.
I discover the Hierophant sighs a lot in private. Every few minutes or so a heartfelt “aaaah” is released. Papers are shuffled.
He sighs more. It’s reassuring to learn that the assured aren’t so assured, but the sighs rapidly become exasperating. There’s also a great deal of scratching, although I can’t identify which part of his body is getting the nail.
Finally, a conversation. The Hierophant explains to an unknown caller that he bought a watch that morning. He went into one shop, checked the price of the model he wanted, then went to another shop where the same model was a hundred dollars more. The Hierophant returned to the first shop and bought the watch.
Not a stunning anecdote, and the Hierophant doesn’t tell it well. He doesn’t tell it any better to caller “Mitchell” and caller “Ellen”. He pads it out explaining how he expressed his outrage to the assistant in the second shop that they were selling the watch for a hundred bucks less in the first, and expressing 81
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astonishment to the assistant in the first shop that they were selling the watch for a hundred more in the second (I�
��m précising here).
It’s unfair to knock someone’s repartee when you’re eaves-dropping, but I doubt if I can carry on bugging the Hierophant, not on account of any ethical discomfort, but because it’s so tedious. I’ve snooped on four and a half hours of the Hierophant’s privacy and I’m drained.
G
“See this watch?’’ the Hierophant asks me the next day, relating that it was one hundred dollars cheaper in the shop he bought it in than anywhere else. I resist the impulse to correct him by saying he only went to one other shop. Who knows, if he’d tried somewhere else he might have found it for a hundred and twenty dollars less, though I doubt it since the market does curb abuse.
But you don’t know. You don’t know whether there is another shop with a better deal. You don’t know whether there’s another shop. Laziness always wins. Sooner or later. How much roaming and asking should you do?
If you spent a week going to forty watch retailers and succeeded in saving a hundred dollars, or even a hundred and twenty, would it justify your effort? You don’t know. That’s what’s so frightening: you walk into one shop and they sell a watch for one price, and another shop sells that watch for another price.
There is a conspiracy. It’s called the world.
“Tyndale, it’s time for the Hierophant to hit the fan.”
The Hierophant requires me to hold a rickety ladder for him, while he climbs up to fix one of the fans. The church doesn’t 82
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have air conditioning (too expensive and troublesome), but five propeller-style fans (cheap but more troublesome). Holding the ladder while the Hierophant spouts some non-God-based profanity, I suffer a powerful attack of futility as I realize that I am holding a rickety ladder in a hut in a run-down part of Miami while a demented ex-Marine fumbles with a fan so old it should be gracing a museum.
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