Idolism

by Marcus Herzig

  We were almost through with our final song, White Smoke, when a police car with blinking blue lights and blaring sirens made a right turn from the Via dei Fori Imperiali into the Piazza del Colosseo and came to a screeching halt right behind our little makeshift stage. Ginger turned her head just as two policemen got out of the car and came walking towards us. She looked at me with her eyes wide open and a panic-stricken look on her face that unmistakeably asked, What the hell are we going to do now?

  I shook my head ever so slightly, signalling her that we weren’t going to do anything, although, to be fair, she may very well have mistaken that for I haven’t got a clue. Julian and Tummy didn’t even notice that something was going on behind them. Tummy was completely entranced by the 500 screaming girls in front of him, and Julian ... well, Julian was in his element. He was so absorbed in his own performance, the whole city of Rome could have gone up in flames around him and he wouldn’t even have noticed. It wasn’t until the music stopped when the policemen had found the off switch of our PA, and the fans started booing, that Julian finally realized that something was going on and he stopped singing.

  The policemen, which bore an uncanny resemblance to a certain pair of video game characters, approached Julian, Ginger, and Tummy. I kept my distance and continued filming and pretending I was just an innocent member of the audience. I figured that if arrests were going to be made, then only three of us going to jail would be better than all four of us. Mario and Luigi started talking like an Italian waterfall. Needless to say that none of us understood a word, not even Tummy, because apparently nothing the coppers had to say had anything to do with food. Julian talked back to them in English, but it turned out that the two policemen understood just about as much English as we understood Italian. The rest of the conversation was a weird cacophony of broken English and Italian that ended in an unequivocal hand gesture by Luigi and the word “Basta!” which is Italian for ‘This thing is over. Go home or we have to arrest you.’

  The crowd, being much more proficient at Italian than we were, started booing again, so Luigi walked over to them and told them to move along because there was nothing left to see here. Disappointed fangirls reluctantly started to comply, although there were a handful who were seemingly appealing to the copper not to be such a party pooper and let us continue to play. And then, all of a sudden, someone from the remaining crowd shouted, “Fumata bianca!”

  And then another one. And another one.

  “Fumata bianca! Fumata bianca!”

  The coppers’ police radios started blaring. Mario and Luigi both listened intently; then they looked at each other and nodded. Mario said, “Basta!” to Julian, Ginger, and Tummy one final time before they hopped into their police car and took off. Meanwhile the crowd had dispersed really quickly, leaving behind only us, Momoko and her camera team, and a couple of confused tourists.

  “Nice concert,” Momoko said. “But then what happen I do not understand.”

  Ginger nodded. “Yeah, what was that all about?”

  “Don’t you get it?” Tummy rolled his eyes. “Fumata bianca. White smoke. Habemus papam!”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “I do,” I said, looking at the display of my mobile phone. “MINDY says the College of Cardinals has elected a new Pope. He’ll make his first public appearance in St Peter’s Square in half an hour.”

  I looked at Julian. The sparkle in his eyes was as bright as a supernova. I immediately started unplugging the microphone and instruments from the PA and packing up because I knew we weren’t going to stay.

  “Tummy,” Julian said, “how far is St Peter’s?”

  “Um ... about three miles.” He looked around and then pointed to the northeast. “That direction.”

  “Well, what are we waiting for?” Julian said and started running towards the car.

  The Gospel According to Tummy – 11

  Rome was nice. For the first time since we’d been on tour, we all felt pretty relaxed because we didn’t have our obsessive-compulsive manager around to tell us what to do and not to do every single minute of the day. We just did what we wanted to do. We were managing ourselves, and we did pretty well if I do say so meself. When we arrived at the airport, Momoko took Michael’s credit card and rented a van. Audiomike drove us into the city where we checked into a nice little hotel. We did a bit of sightseeing. We had pizza. We had ice cream. We sat down on the Spanish Steps and recorded an interview with Momoko. It was a fun interview. We all laughed a lot. Well, except Julian of course. Julian had never been the laughing type. But at least he smiled at all the silliness we produced in front of the camera. We had a lot of fun. Even Ginger stopped bickering with me for once.

  In the late afternoon we went to the Colosseum where we had a secret gig planned. Well, it wasn’t that secret a gig really, because Michael announced it on Twitter and Facebook, and we shot a short teaser trailer for our followers

  The gig lasted about 20 minutes. We played four songs. Momoko and her crew recorded the gig for her TV show, and Michael streamed it live to our YouTube channel. We had a blast. At least until Mario and Luigi pulled up in their car and shut us down. They came up to us and gave us a very long speech. Everybody was looking at me, expecting a translation. That was a wee bit embarrassing for me, because I had no idea what they were saying. So we had to retreat to English which was a lot easier for us than it was for Mario and Luigi, but in the end both sides got the message. They made it clear that we couldn’t continue our concert, and we made it clear that we were just a bunch of stupid tourist kids who didn’t mean any harm, and so they just gave us a warning. As we were about to settle, things people in the crowd started shouting, “Fumata bianca! Fumata bianca!” which is Italian for white smoke, and for a moment I thought that those people wanted us to play our song White Smoke once more. But then it dawned on me that when people in Rome shouted ‘Fumata bianca!’ it could really just mean one thing: the Conclave had just elected a new Pope. And sure enough a moment later Michael checked his phone to have the news confirmed, and with a sparkle in his eyes as if it were Christmas Julian said, “We need to go to St Peter’s.”

  Forget all clichés and prejudices you’ve ever heard about Asian drivers. Momoko raced through the evening rush hour of Rome like the devil himself, with screeching tires, rude hand gestures and a considerable amount of curses for her fellow road users. Well, I didn’t understand a lot of Japanese, but I’m pretty sure they were curses. It was a hell of a ride, the kind of ride people would pay money for at an amusement park. I was sitting in the back seat by the right door, clinging onto the door handle—and onto dear life—as Julian, in the seat next to me, explained the ideas he had for the White Smoke music video.

  “We need to find a place with a good view of the balcony where the Pope will appear,” he said. “Not in the middle of the square, though. It’ll be way too crowded, and we don’t want to disturb or annoy the other fans.”

  “Fans?” I asked.

  “Fans, believers, devotees, call them whatever you want. Anyway, I’m thinking somewhere on the outskirts, near the Colonnades. The place will be packed to the rafters, but we should find some space there. And we can’t actually play loud music because we’d probably get arrested right on the spot, so I need you, Michael, to feed us the song to our mobiles, and we’ll just put our ear buds in. Tummy and Ginger will be standing next to me and looking important, I’ll be lip-synching the lyrics, and you’ll be shooting us on your mobile with the crowds on St Peter’s Square and the Pope on the balcony in the background.”

  “That’ll work I guess,” Michael said

  “A second camera would be nice,” Julian said. “For a different angle. Ron, we need a cameraman. Are you for hire?”

  Cameraron turned around to Julian and grinned. “I take 200 pounds an hour for freelance work.”

  “We probably won’t need you for more than ten minutes, so that’ll be... 33 pounds, yes?”

 
“Sorry, mate,” Cameraron said. “One hour minimum. I’ve got hungry mouths to feed back home.”

  Julian looked at me. “Michael, will our budget allow 200 quid for Ron?”

  “Just about,” he said, and I grinned. He had told me earlier that our PayPal balance was somewhere way north of a hundred thousand pounds.

  Momoko parked the van in a small side street about half a mile away from St Peter’s. We had barely stopped, when Julian grabbed his mic stand—the only prop needed for our video shoot—and jumped out of the car.

  “Andiamo!” he said and started running towards Via della Conciliazione, the wide alley that led directly to St Peter’s Square.

  “Julian, wait!” Ginger shouted after him, but he had already turned around the corner.

  “Let him go,” Michael said. “We’ll catch up with him.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’ll be really easy to spot him among a quarter of a million people.”

  “He said he wants to shoot the video at the Colonnades with a good view of the balcony. 250,000 people is a lot, but most of them will be flocking as close to the basilica as possible. The outskirts of the square will be much less crowded.”

  “From your lips to God’s ears.”

  We waited for Cameraron and Audiomike to get their equipment out of the van and put on their gear, and then we dived into the river of people that was unwaveringly flowing towards the Holy See.

  When we got to St Peter’s Square, it was already packed with people, tens of thousands of them. There were nuns from Nicaragua, vicars from Vienna, priests from Poland, and ministers from Malaysia, all of them waving flags and chanting chants and staring at the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica where the Pope was expected to make an appearance any minute.

  Emerging from the crowd, Julian came running towards us.

  “Going home already?”

  Julian ignored my silly question. “I’ve found the perfect spot, guys. Come on!”

  He led us to the left, to the Colonnades that lined the square, walked up the three steps to the top and stood between the third and fourth column. The elevation wasn’t much, but it gave us a better view of the crowd that had gathered in the square. Right at the front, near the steps that led up to the basilica, people stood packed like at a football stadium or a rock concert. But here at the very outskirts of the square there didn’t seem to be much more people than on a regular day.

  “So what do you think?” Julian asked us excitedly.

  “That’ll work,” Michael said and took his laptop out of his bag. “How much time do we have?”

  Julian looked up at the balcony at the centre of the basilica. The big French door was still covered by heavy, red velvet curtains. “Not sure. Tummy?”

  I looked around, looked at me watch, looked at the basilica, and said, “Difficult to say. Not much. Five minutes, maybe ten. Not more.”

  “Okay,” Julian said, “let’s get ready.”

  We put in our ear buds and got into position, right between two of the columns that lined St Peter’s Square. People were still streaming into the square from all sides, and it got more and more crowded by the minute, but there was still enough room for us to operate without getting in anyone’s way. Michael started the camera on his mobile phone and put himself in a position from where he’d have Julian right at the centre of the image, with Ginger and me to the right and to the left, a quarter of a million flag waving, chanting and cheering people in the background, and the balcony of the basilica where the new Pope was going to make his first public appearance right above Julian’s head. Meanwhile, Cameraron was standing a few metres away from us, catching the same scene from a different angle, and behind Michael I saw Momoko say, “Is so exciting,” to Audiomike like a giddy little schoolgirl. He didn’t have the time to reply.

  “Okay, something’s happening!” Michael shouted over the deafening cheer that rose from the crowd in the square as the curtains were removed from the French door, the door opened, and the cardinal proto-deacon stepped out into the lush evening air.

  Michael snapped his fingers to catch our attention and said, “Okay, lights, camera, music, action!” Then he pushed the play button on his laptop to feed the song into our ears.

  As the music started playing and Julian began to move his lips, the cardinal proto-deacon stepped up to the microphone, waited a moment until the crowd had settled down, and then he said, “Annuntio vobis gaudium magnum: habemus papam!”

  I announce to you a great joy: we have a Pope.

  Another deafening cheer from the crowd made him pause again.

  Meanwhile, Ginger and I were standing next to Julian with our hands in our pockets looking all artsy fartsy as Cameraron and Michael filmed us in front of that beautiful backdrop of St. Peter’s. It was quite an epic scene.

  Only Julian didn’t stick to the plan. Our video shooting was supposed to be completely silent, but Julian’s lip-synching soon turned into singing. No, singing is not the right word. By the time he got to the second verse, he was belting out the song as if he were trying to make his voice reach the upper circle of a giant opera house. As the crowd fell silent to hear the name of the new pope, Julian’s voice travelled a good distance across the square. It turned out that you could even hear it in some of the TV footage. People in our direct vicinity were shooting us angry looks, and Michael was trying to catch Julian’s attention to signal him to turn it down a notch or ten, but Julian was in a different world. The only way to make him stop singing would have been to stop the music and abort the entire video shoot, but we couldn’t do that, could we? Julian would have been so disappointed that we blew this unique chance.

  The cardinal proto-deacon continued: “Eminentissimum ac reverendissimum Dominum,” the most eminent and reverent Lord, “Dominum Robertum Sanctae Romanae Ecclesiae Clericum Maddock,” Lord Robert Priest of the Holy Roman Church Maddock, “Qui sibi nomen imposuit Pii Decimi Tertii,” who takes for himself the name of Pius XIII.

  The crowd in St Peter’s Square went wild. It was as if what had just happened didn’t even register with them at all. They had come to St Peter’s to hear who the new pope would be, and they heard it, and they were satisfied. None of them seemed to grasp the scope if it, none of them immediately realized the implications this historic election would have on the Roman Catholic Church and—indeed—the world. It would take most of the people who were in St Peter’s Square that evening several days and an overdose of news programmes and political talk shows to realize that it wasn’t the mere fact that Robert Maddock was the first pope in over 600 years who had not previously been a cardinal, or that he was the first American who was ever elected pope, that made this a cataclysmic event. It was the fact that he was the first multi-billionaire ever to head the Catholic Church, to be the direct successor of St Peter, the Bishop of Rome, and the Vicar of Christ himself.

  I’m not claiming that I realized all these things right away, but I can’t deny that the moment I heard the cardinal proto-deacon utter Robert Maddock’s name, I felt an icy shiver creeping down me spine, and me brain was ready to explode. However, all me thoughts were stopped dead in their tracks when I suddenly saw our old friends Mario and Luigi breaking through the crowd. They pounced on Julian from both sides, grabbed his arms and handcuffed him before he even knew what was going on. He struggled, he stumbled, and he fell to the ground. Ginger and I immediately rushed to help him back on his feet before we were handcuffed ourselves. The last thing you can see on the footage Michael shot that evening is Pope Pius XIII standing on the central balcony of St Peter’s Basilica, waving to an ecstatic crowd as Luigi comes walking towards the camera, making the now already all too familiar gesture with his arms and saying, “Basta!”

  I’m not sure how many policemen usually are on duty in Rome at 7 p.m. on a Thursday night, but my guess is they’re exactly two, and this time they weren’t going to let us get away with a warning.

  This time they threw us in a jail cell.

  Rock’n�
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  The Second Revelation of Edward Pickle

  Robert Maddock’s retreat from the airwaves was the ultimate jump start for MMC’s national and international operations. It was the spark that ignited the flame of our global success. But make no mistake, behind the scenes nothing really changed. Mr Maddock may have adorned himself with his fancy new title of chief executive officer, but it was still me who was calling the shots.

  Every single day he would come to me and say, “Pickle, what are we gonna do about this and that?” and I would tell him to do so and so, and he would say, “Okay, let’s do it then.”

  The secret was to make him believe that his decisions were indeed his decisions, even if they were mine. I did that by carefully filtering and selecting the information I let through to him. I never gave him all the pros and cons of any one issue. Instead, I gave him mostly the pros of the things I thought we needed to do, and I gave him mostly the cons of everything else. Mr Maddock ended up weighing those pros and cons against each other, and in nine out of ten cases he came to the desired conclusion for which I never forgot to praise him. It made him not only feel powerful, it also made him feel incredibly smart and business-savvy. That is how I created the illusory image of Robert Maddock as not only one of the most successful but also one of the most intelligent businessmen in the world. I made them all believe it—the whole world, and even Mr Maddock himself. Even though he was really just a tool.

  It was a long and rocky road from the weekly two-hour show on a cable TV station in Alabama to the global media conglomerate that was MMC, but it was worth all the hassle, all the pain, and all the putting up with Mr Maddock’s horridly crude humour, his despotism, and his twisted morals. I will readily admit that like most Christians—I never was a firm believer, but I regard myself as a cultural Christian—I do rather enjoy my masochistic tendencies. No matter if it’s the God of the Old Testament or the CEO of the biggest media corporation in the world, one has to be willing and able to subject oneself to a cranky, neurotic tyrant. It takes a lot of strength—and some courage—to do that, but at the end of the day it’s an experience that can be as empowering and rewarding as it is humbling. It’s humbling, because it constantly reminds you of your inherent pettiness, your insignificance, and your own shortcomings. It’s empowering, because if you give in to your masochism, you know that you do so at your own volition. You choose to be a servant, and that ultimately gives you a feeling of power over the one you serve.