That’s my job: rickety-ladder-holder. For which I’m not paid.
The despair grows so strong I can barely stand up.
I attempt to amuse myself by imagining killing, but it doesn’t work. I’m too aware that imagining killing is a trait of the defeated, and that my romps of violence will never happen. Not only will I never beat Loader to death with a handy bit of metal, I probably won’t so much as tread on his toe. I’ll never get to see him luckless and broken. You just don’t get an opportunity for revenge. I think of all the people who’ve shat on me and I’ve just never once had a chance to settle up; they’ve never once walked in front of my car on a dark, rainy, witness-poor night.
On the other hand, while I’ve never managed to get even with my malefactors, I’ve never been able to get even with my benefactors either. True, the latter category is dishearteningly small – family excepted – countable on the palms of my hands really. Bamford, for instance, who pulled me out of the shit, who saved me, all I could do was to say to him “thank you”. A sound isn’t much.
We nothing along with no real power to touch those we want to. I’m here now in Miami, holding a rickety ladder with a persistent and embarrassing medical condition, my other years of no consequence.
I arrived here with no baggage, nothing to help me or hinder me. Born again, the same start whether I had spent my previous 83
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life giving stray kittens milk and running errands for the elderly, or microwaving puppies and strangling the old. Your moral bank account is a currency that can’t buy you anything.
“What was Vietnam like?” I ask to make conversation.
“Hot,” replies the Hierophant. I wait for more detail, but it’s not coming.
“Did you get to the jungle?”
“Yes.”
I wait. After two more minutes of fan-fiddling, I try:
“So what happened?”
“My watchstrap rotted. Everything rots there. Your uniform.
Your nutsack. Everything.”
More silence follows. Finally, the fan jerks into motion.
The Hierophant packs away his tools. “Do you want to know the most astonishing thing I saw while I was in ’Nam?”
“Go on.”
“There were lots of bars and whorehouses. Lots. But one bar had this sign outside saying “Giant midgets”. I never went in.
But my question to you, Tyndale, is this: if they really were giant midgets, how could you tell?”
Picking up the pen, I leave the Hierophant. In my car, I suddenly get pangs of hunger. I should be holy and not bother with food, but I’m so beaten I hang up the holiness for the day.
I ponder where I should go for a meal.
There’s a greasy, hole-in-the-wall place on the next block I’ve noticed, with a greasy, sweaty guy surrounded by greasy bits of scrawled-on card listing his dishes that I’ve never tried because everything about the enterprise said don’t. I now realize I’m too hungry to venture further, so I saunter over and buy a chicken sandwich.
When I bite into the cheap sandwich, I learn how wrong I was.
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The fried chicken is unimprovable: happy chicken, ideal batter, fresh roll, one crisp leaf of lettuce. A simple but unbeatable sandwich, made with reverence for the reputation of the fried-chicken sandwich. A testament to good ingredients and the power of man to create tastiness.
In any job, it’s easier to go through the motions, and in any job going the extra mile rarely gets you anything. The roll could have been stale, the chicken stringy or oily, but they’re not. This guy gets up early to do the job right and it’s unlikely it’ll get him ahead of the stringy-chicken gang. Eventually he’ll get ill or old or broken and there will be no record, no memorial to his home-cooked triumph. I salute the valour, the unbowed courage of this lone chicken-sandwich seller.
“Great sandwich,” I say.
The sandwich-maker shrugs and wipes his counter.
This unforeseen attack by quality restores my faith in life. Part of my joy lies in the fact that I’m ahead. I’ve given the sandwich maker a small amount of money and he’s given me bliss.
As you get older you understand that emotion is like the weather: despair, rage, self-hatred, delight, they all pass (even if they leave some damage). Knowing this doesn’t help much, just as knowing on a cold, rainy day that the cold and rain won’t last for ever.
It’s embarrassing. Holding rickety ladder: down. Eating great fried-chicken sandwich: up.
I wish I could control my mood, spurning fried-chicken sandwiches, repelling rickety ladders, but I can’t. Perhaps that’s where holiness comes in. If you can have the fried-chicken bonus without the fried chicken. But if you could have the fried-chicken bonus without the fried chicken, what’s the point of fried chicken and what’s the point of skipping it?
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I buy two more sandwiches to take home, aware that the hit won’t be the same as the first.
G
Dawn kicks down the door of my unconsciousness and I pray hard. I pray hard for everyone before I get up, and then, gradually, the selfishness takes over.
How am I doing? That’s the question, but what’s the answer?
How am I doing? That’s what I’d like to know. Maybe I’m holding a rickety ladder for an eccentric ex-Marine, gratis, but maybe given the luck I’ve been allocated, maybe that’s the best I could do. Maybe I’m not a failure; perhaps I’m viewed as a failure by many, but to the contrary, I have triumphed over several realms of adversity.
You don’t know. It would be interesting to have a hotline to the Supreme Being to ask: how am I doing? But if you could, would you? What if the answer’s not one you want?
I’ve only ever made two mistakes: too much or not enough.
Too much determination or not enough determination. Too much trust, or not enough. Too much optimism or not enough.
Or, if you want, I’ve only ever made one mistake: not getting it right.
Victory, Bamford used to insist, was not achieved soaring joyfully over the winning line, with the competition in the distance. Victory, he said, was usually a matter of crawling on all fours, cursing and dribbling, your ankles gnawed by your enemies.
If so, I may be on the road to victory, as I’m definitely crawling.
I resolve to get into the church early to check the pen.
Out in the driveway I find a dog crapping. It’s an old corgi mix. The dog growls with gusto. Why do old, small dogs yearn 86
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to pick fights? I locate the owner standing several yards away, smoking a cigarette dreamily; one of those dog-owners too lazy to walk their dog, content to let it off the leash and let it crap everywhere.
I don’t know why I commit the error of being reasonable.
Perhaps because I assume the owner is a neighbour and one wants cordiality on the block. Perhaps the holiness is getting to me.
“Might be a good idea to keep the dog on a lead,” I smile.
Always smile.
“My dog is no business of yours,” he says. Immediately I see him. Smug self-feaster. High on his I. Bureaucrat. Not gifted enough to be a banker or businessman, but safely ensconced somewhere doing something where results don’t matter, but you still get good holidays and reasonable pay: drugs counsellor, or human-rights monitor, so he can claim he’s not part of the system, while getting pumped full of comfortable blood.
He’ll have Congolese thumb-piano music to show how open he is to other (chiefly less affluent) cultures. He will bore you about the environment and the crimes of governments and multinationals, the sweatshops of Asia and the battle against malaria, but he smokes and lets his dog coil out a biggie on someone else’s driveway. Uncanny, how fast you can hate.
The dog, too fat and ailing to jump, half-jumps up on my leg and barks at me in the best frenzy it can muster.
“What’s wrong with you?
” says the smoker to his dog in an amused, sing-song, talking-to-a-small-child tone. I’ve noticed this with dog-owners. They never apologize.
“If—” I start to raise the matter of the dog log, when the dog bites me. A nip, but still painful. I glare at the smoker waiting for an apology. I wait. He takes a drag on his cigarette.
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“Your dog just bit me.”
“No, it didn’t.”
Now he could have said this in a dishonest, I-don’t-want-to-accept-any-liability-for-this way, in case I had two lawyers hiding in a bush nearby, but no. Although his dog bit me in front of him, in excellent daylight, he sincerely doesn’t believe it. He is outraged by this vilification of his dog.
I’m so angry I can’t hit him properly, and I punch him in the face, which is a mistake, because you’ll only damage your fist.
But I suppose I go for the face because it’s the seat of the mouth.
My knuckles get a twinge of hot ash. After his dog shat in my driveway, attacked me and he called me a liar, it would have been a crime to just walk away.
Here’s the remarkable thing: as my fist closed in, there was an expression of surprise on his face. It’s also remarkable how much scheming can fit into a second: although I was exploding, there was that part of me, having grown up in a big city, that calculated it was safe to hit him.
My fist sits him down and, now that violence is being dispensed, the dog slinks off to a safe distance.
I get into my car and drive to the church, although I’m so angry I drive through a red light and almost do it again. I’m angry I’m on the same planet with idiots like that. I’m angry because I can’t win. If I hadn’t punched him, I’d be furious with myself for not hitting him, but I’m also angry because I hit him.
Hitting him makes me marginally less angry than not hitting him, but what makes me churn and churn is that the smoker will now be amassing sympathy by telling anyone who’ll listen how he was peacefully walking his dog when he was assaulted by a lunatic and what is the world coming to when a man can’t 88
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walk his dog in safety. Thinking about it makes me so angry I want to go back and thump him again.
Bulging with rage, I attempt to listen to the pen. This time the pen has captured something worthwhile. I hear the Hierophant talking about going up to Rhode Island and then an odd conversation about investing in cobia, apparently some deep-sea fish that loves to be farmed, that gets off on captivity, regular feeding and a warm tank. I was considering how to infiltrate this information into our dialogue in a godlike all-knowing manner when the Hierophant strolled in.
“Good morning, Tyndale, I may be going up to Rhode Island for a few days.” So much for two hours of listening to sighs.
I remember the newspaper profile said the Hierophant came from Rhode Island, so I decide to bowl that info.
“Back to your roots, Gene? You do have a Rhode Island air about you.”
“Hardly. I come from Cleveland.” Never believe anything you read in the paper. I take a breather, make some coffee and then take another route.
“Gene, I had this dream about you and fish. You were like Christ multiplying the fish and feeding everyone, but making lots of money. The fish had this weird name, kopia or something.”
The Hierophant sighs. He takes off his glasses and polishes them. “I knew this would happen. It always does. Tyndale, son, Miami’s full of it, you’ve got to stay away from that stuff. Okay?
Just stop. You can’t help out here if you’re on space patrol.”
“No—”
“Don’t say a word, Tyndale. I understand, I really do. We’re all weak. We all sin. Let’s pray.”
I have to sit through a lengthy, custom-built homily on narcotics, then we settle down to preparing sandwiches for the 89
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homeless. As we load up, across the road an argument starts up.
Two black guys, one black woman. It’s heated. Then one of the guys wallops the woman, open-handed, but we feel the boom.
It’s a real connecter.
The group is, however, far away enough from us for us to be able to pretend it’s not happening. In fact, there’s a couple of Sikhs unloading some boxes halfway between us and them, Sikhs who are giving the unloading of those boxes their deepest concentration. And we don’t know what’s going on. Maybe she deserved it (you never know). I have no interest in getting involved, because there’s nothing in it for me, but the Hierophant straightens up: “Let’s sort this out.”
He strides over purposefully. This is the last thing I want to do.
The two guys are door-sized and either one could turn me into pulp. Having grown up in a big city, I know heavy when I see it. But if I chicken out now, bang goes my credit with the Hierophant.
My jaw is tingling as if it’s already been jigsawed as I tag along behind the Hierophant, close enough for him to accept that I’m backing him up, but not so close that the yellers would automatically assume so. I tell myself the guys won’t beat us up.
They’ll probably just shoot us. I’m willing the Hierophant not to say anything foolish or provocative such as hitting women is wrong.
He smiles. “Do you need to pray by any chance? We have a church just across the way if you need one. We’re always open for hard prayer.” It’s the last line they’re expecting. The woman tells us to go to hell. The guys laugh: the engine’s been switched off.
As we walk back it occurs to me the Hierophant had the advantage of age. If he’d been twenty or so, the same age as the guys, no matter what he would have said would have been seen 90
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as a challenge, they would have had to mash him; but he’s a ghost from another world. Did the Hierophant know this?
Back home, I listen to the pen again. The exchange about the cobia is quite clear. They can’t wait to be farmed. The Hierophant has balls, but he’s losing his marbles.
G
I’m very tempted to give up on the omniscience front, but I have the inestimable gift of not being able to afford giving up; it’s God or bust. The following day, I return to the pen, and prod myself lightly with a knife to offset the tedium of listening to the sighs and scratching.
I hear an exchange about sigmoidoscopy. It sounds very serious and medical. The Hierophant’s voice is unprecedentedly dejected.
Googling, I discover that sigmoidoscopy is arse invasion. The Hierophant has gut problems. If he drops dead is that a help or hindrance? The callousness of my reflection pleases me.
I ruminate on some clever way to divulge this info, but can’t.
You either have spooky knowledge or you don’t.
“You know, Gene, I do get these premonitions. I wouldn’t say anything about it, but I had this dream and I’m worried about you. You had some stomach problems. I know you’ll think this crazy, but why don’t you have a check-up?” I say when he comes in.
“Had one a month ago,” he declares. “Scared the doctors with my health. You can forget about your premonitions. Thirty push-ups every morning and my turds are award-winners.
However, I’ve had some not so good news. My mother’s in a bad way.” Sigmoidoscopy, I’d wager. “Truth be told, she’s just about done.”
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His mother is bedridden, terminal. The Hierophant’s returning to Cleveland to care for her. It’s a situation where so many would find so many reasons for not rushing to the bedside. For sending money instead. The Hierophant has bad taste in clothes and jokes (Marine jokes pioneer new levels of tastelessness), but he has no fear. I really do admire him. He is a decency-heavy individual and that’s why he has a small, congregation-light church which he’s about to lose to me. It’s strange how when you’re getting what you want, you still try to ruin it.
“Can’t you bring her down here?” I suggest, realizing that would counter my progress.
“She’s never left Cleve
land in her life. I doubt she has much idea where she is, but it would be wrong to move her. She’d want to end there.” Again, he shuns the easy road.
“This is very difficult for me,” he continues. “Her friends have been helping her, but she needs round-the-clock care now. I hate to leave my flock here, but I have to go. But in a way I’m lucky.
I’m very lucky because I have you. You know, Tyndale, I get lots of offers to help out, a lot, but they rarely translate into actions, but you’re the only who’s been a pillar. You’re here day after day, never asking for anything, always willing, you’re quite something. The only reason I can go to be with my mother is because you’ll be here ministering for me.”
So, it’s official. I have my Church. I feel enormous guilt. The Hierophant’s faith moves me. Tears breed in my eyes. Why is it you always get what you want in a way you don’t want it?
He makes me sub-Hierophant, the first in the history of the Church.
“Any advice you want to give me?” I ask.
“Yes. Don’t do it.”
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“Sorry?”
“Don’t be a pastor. Don’t run a church. That’s the best advice I can give. Don’t do it. One other very important thing. If Mrs Barrodale invites you to lunch, don’t go. Her food’s terrible.”
The next day I retrieve the pen and hit on a conversation.
The Hierophant is explaining he’s off to Cleveland to nurse his mother. “No, I’m not closing the church. There’s a follower who can run things for me. He’s a bit strange, and he may not be right, but I have to give him a chance.”
This is my punishment for bugging the office. We’re never quite as loved as we hope we are, but, mulling it over, it’s even more touching, if he has doubts about me, that he’s willing to praise me up and give me a chance.
Enough dabbling in omniscience.
G
I wake up in the dark, drenched in an unpleasant sweat. A giant hand is squeezing my guts and I curl up into a ball. I feel far from home, and utterly beaten. With a total lack of dignity, I moan. Perhaps we are all far from home and utterly beaten, and the trick is not to feel it. Lying on a door in an empty room, soon-to-be mentor to a handful of Miami’s foozlers, with a few hundred dollars to my name, I feel it keenly.
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