Beware of God (3 page)

He opened a dusty old prayer book, and turned to the evening service.

“Forgive us, our Father, for we have erred. Pardon us, our King, for we have willfully sinned.”

A droplet fell onto the page before him, and Bloom realized that he was crying.

“Blessed are you, O Lord, the Gracious One who pardons abundantly.”

 

F
UCK
,” said God.

Bloom's apartment had been empty, and they were back in the car, heading across town.

“He could be anywhere,” said Death.

“I hate this goddamn city,” said Lucifer.

“Turn left here,” said God.

God knew where Bloom was. He was where they all went when they wanted to make His job more difficult than it had to be.

“Right here,” said God.“Pull over.”

Bloom gently closed his prayer book, kissed the cover and walked silently out to the lobby. He felt a new, keener sense of his place in the world, as if by sparing his body, God had reawakened his soul.

As Bloom pushed on the heavy synagogue door that led to the chaotic, Godless city beyond, he noticed a small shelf hanging humbly beside the doorway. The shelf was lined with a number of charity collection boxes—for children in Israel, for the poor, for the UJA.

Repentance, prayer and charity remove the evil of His decree.

Bloom reached into his pocket, and divided whatever money he had between them.

What was the value of money in the face of God's eternal judgment?

The night was warm and muggy, but Bloom felt more alive than he had in years. He smiled, put his hands in his pockets and headed across the street.

He heard the squeal of tires behind him, but there wasn't even time to turn around before the car slammed into his back, throwing him up in the air and into oncoming traffic. A taxicab coming the other way couldn't stop, and hit Bloom a second time before his body finally crumpled to the ground.

Death checked out the back window.

“Got him,” he said.

Lucifer nodded.

“Got him.”

 

C
IGARETTES
?” asked Lucifer. “You're going to tell me that
cigarettes
are a more efficient killer than tuberculosis?”

Death and Lucifer sat in God's office, playing poker and sharing a bottle of wine.

“It's not a question of efficiency,” said Death, “it's a question of precision. You give one person TB, you give a thousand people TB. Then you spend the next hundred years rebirthing all the people who weren't supposed to die in the first place. You're just creating more work for yourself. I'm saying, you get your guy hooked on Camels, boom—you got yourself one dead guy. No fuss, no muss.”

“Yeah, but what about secondhand smoke?”

“You're comparing a couple of accidental kills off secondhand smoke to a viral plague that wiped out half of Europe?”

“If you're talking accuracy,” said Lucifer, “I'll give you cigarettes over tuberculosis. But efficiency-wise—I'm talking bang for the buck—TB wins hands down. That's my point.”

Death looked around.

“Where's God, anyway?” he asked.

“At the funeral,” said Lucifer.

“He still goes to those?” asked Death.

Lucifer shrugged. “Full house,” he said, laying down his cards.

“Damn.”

 

F
UCK
,” said God.

The angels stood quietly at the back of the cemetery, their eyes locked nervously on the place where their feet would have been.

As Bloom's body was lowered into the grave, the rabbi stood and prayed aloud:

“The Rock! Perfect in every way. Who can say to Him, “What have you done?” He rules above and below, brings death and resuscitates, brings down to the grave and rises up! God gave and God took away, Blessed is the name of Hashem!”

The angels sang, their sweet, melodic voices ascending as one.—Hallelu …”

“Not now,” said God.

Bloom's mother began to weep.

God closed his eyes and massaged His temples, trying to stave off the migraine He knew was coming. He was getting tired of this.

Tired of the whole damn business.

I
T
was Shabbos morning, and Heimish lay uneasily on his tartan dogbed beside the radiator, watching Shlomo furiously jerking himself off. I Heimish's dark, wet eyes filled with loathing and contempt.

“Look at you,” the dog said. “If it weren't so sinful it'd be pathetic.”

Shlomo was only ten years old and somewhat new to the whole masturbating thing, so he needed every bit of concentration he could muster.

“Ugh,” growled Heimish, “have some self-respect.”

Shlomo angrily stood up, held a towel in front of himself and opened the bedroom door.

“Whoa, whoa,” said Heimish. “Watch where you're pointing that thing.”

“Out!” said Shlomo. “Go on!”

“Oh, thank God,” said Heimish as he slinked toward the door. “I thought you wanted to fuck me.”

“Out!”

“Pig.”

Shlomo slammed the door. What a pain in the ass that dog had been lately. He looked down at the shriveling organ in his hand.

“You call that a penis?” he thought to himself.

Shlomo felt ashamed. He worried that God would punish him. He had been told by his rabbis that if you masturbate you go to hell and they boil you in a pot filled with all the semen that you wasted in your lifetime. He wondered if the rabbis were right. He wondered how full his pot was.

He went back to bed, added a few more shots to his boiling cauldron and got dressed for shul.

 

T
HE
first time Shlomo heard the term
blowjob,
he spent a week crouched over on the toilet, desperately blowing at his penis like a lost hiker trying to start a fire. Everything Shlomo learned about sex he had learned at third hand from his classmates who had learned it at second hand from their brothers who had learned it at first hand from their fathers' pornography. After nearly hyperventilating, he tried using his mother's hairdryer (both warm and cold settings), but with little success. His father had been waiting for him outside the bathroom door. “Faigaleh,” he'd said angrily, and slapped Shlomo hard across his face. “Blow dryers are for girls.”

The few semantic clues Shlomo managed to piece together only made the physical mystery that much greater.

Cock?

Snatch?

Twat?

What could a twat possibly be?

He was able to figure out that jerking off was something he could do to himself, but there was nothing in the language that offered any specific instruction. And then, just last week, Chaim Laifer referred to Rabbi Grunembaum as “a jerkoff” while vigorously pumping his fist up and down.

It was like discovering a secret handshake.

Not that it was easy. He tried a few times, but it tickled terribly and Shlomo would stop, afraid that any more secret handshaking would make him pee in his bed. But last night, after everyone had fallen asleep from the heavy Friday evening meal, Shlomo bravely decided to risk it.

He'd locked the bathroom door, gotten undressed and slipped into the bathtub with a bottle of his mother's Jergens. He figured that if he did pee, well, at least it would be in the bathtub.

Shlomo didn't pee.

A thick white fluid he'd never seen before came out of him and slid sadly down his tightly clenched fingers.

“Dear God,” thought Shlomo. “What have I done?”

He felt like crying.

His sin was everywhere.

It was like trying to clear a murder scene. He mopped the murdered Jewish souls off his hands with a couple of tissues, flushed them down the toilet and hid the Jergens behind the medicine rack. Shlomo quickly dressed and opened the bathroom door, ready for the dash to his bedroom.

Heimish sat waiting outside the bathroom door.

“I hope you're happy,” Heimish said to him. “You just flushed a million Jews down the toilet.”

Shlomo stomped at Heimish, who yelped and ran away.

He lay awake for some time that night, staring at the ceiling through the darkness and wondering how God would punish him. He had been told by his rabbis that when you die, all the souls you murdered in each wasted ejaculation would gather together and chase you through the firmament, hounding you for eternity. He wondered if the rabbis were right. He wondered if Heimish was right. He buried a few million more souls in a Kleenex and fell asleep.

 

S
HLOMO
clipped on his tie and went downstairs for breakfast.

“Well, look who's here,” said Heimish, looking up from his bowl of kibble. “Boy,” Heimish said under his breath to Shlomo's mother, “I could tell you some stories.”

“Get out of here!” Shlomo yelled at Heimish.

“What are you doing?” Shlomo's mother asked. “Heimish, stay. You're a good boy.”

“One load last night, another this morning,” said Heimish. “The kid's a machine.”

“He's always watching me,” grumbled Shlomo.

“He loves you,” his mother said. “Have some breakfast.”

“I'm late for shul.”

It was a cool autumn morning. Shlomo buttoned his suit jacket and pulled his collar up around his neck. It was beginning to feel a lot like Yom Kippur.

Shlomo would have a lot of repenting to do that day.

He walked down the steep hill of Pine Road, and made the right turn onto Carlton Lane. As he passed by the Hirschs' mailbox, something at the edge of the woods caught his eye.

It was the fluttering page of an old magazine. But it wasn't the fluttering that caught his eye, it was the color of the page.

It was pink.

Pornography pink.

Shlomo checked both ways to see if anybody was watching, and ducked into the woods.

The magazine was called
Juggs
. He picked up the magazine and walked a bit farther into the woods.

What Shlomo had discovered, according to the tagline, wasn't just any porno mag—it was The Dirtiest Tit Mag in the World. On the cover, a woman named Candy Cantaloupes licked a half-peeled banana which she held between her unfeasibly humongous breasts. Candy had recently been named the Slut of The Year, an award she certainly seemed to deserve. In Chapter - “Somebody Up There Likes You”, Candy lay happily on her back while a man straddled her chest. He had put his penis where until then only bananas had been.

The very idea!

Shlomo's mind reeled.

Putting a penis between breasts! Who thought of such things! He started to stiffen. Shlomo unzipped his pants and began to rub himself.

Suddenly he heard the unmistakable sound of a twig snapping behind him. Shlomo jumped, tried to hide his nakedness and spun around to see who was …

Heimish.

Heimish wagged his tail and cocked his head curiously at both Shlomo and Shlomo's penis, which had, in all the excitement, made its way back out of his pants.

“What's the commotion?” his penis seemed to ask.

“Dear God,” asked Heimish, “can't you go one hour without debasing yourself?”

Shlomo picked up a stick and threw it hard at Heimish. “Get out of here!” he spat at the whimpering hound. Heimish went back to the road and trotted back home with his head held low.

“You're sick, you know that!” called Heimish. “Sick!”

Shlomo stuffed the magazine inside his jacket sleeve and continued on his way to shul.

The congregation was already halfway through the service. Shlomo paused outside the doorway; he worried for a moment that if he walked inside he would burst into flames.

He held his breath and slowly reached for the doorknob. He turned it gently and pushed the door open.

Phew.

It was ten-thirty already, and the rabbi was most of the way through his sermon, so Shlomo decided to wait outside in the lobby with all the young mothers with their babies and their strollers and their tight, silk blouses you could see their lacy, pointy bras through.

Shlomo watched them from a safe perch high on the steps to the women's section. He loved seeing women with babies. They may as well have been wearing a sign that read “I have sex.” There was no denying it. Just knowing that he was surrounded with all these women who would put cocks in their twats drove Shlomo absolutely mad.

He ran to the men's room, found an empty stall and locked the door.

As Rabbi Teitelbaum finished his Shabbos speech on the power of davening, Shlomo ejaculated on Tiffany Mound's mounds.

He shoved the magazine back into his jacket. He knew that if he picked up a siddur now he would burst into flames. He turned the tap above the sink just as Dr. Kaplan walked in.

“Good Shabbos,” said Dr. Kaplan as he started to pee.

“Good Shabbos,” said Shlomo as he washed the sin off his hands. He looked out the window, and noticed a dog out there, calmly waiting at the end of the shul driveway.

Heimish.

Over the driveway, through the trees, past the main entrance, through the bathroom window, Heimish looked directly at Shlomo and shook his head in disgust.

That was all Shlomo needed, that damn dog blabbing to everyone.

“Great,” said Heimish. “You've defiled a synagogue. Why don't you stop by the Holocaust Museum on the way home and defile that, too?”

A group of older boys walked over to Heimish and began to pet him.

“Hey, Heimish!” one said.

“What's shakin', Heimish,” said another.

“Mmm,” Heimish whispered to Shlomo. “It's so nice to be petted by hands unsullied by the sin of emission.”

Shlomo pulled his suit jacket tightly around the dirtiest tit mag in the world and ran outside. He made his way as quickly as he could through the busy lobby, dodging the rabbi and strollers and toys.

“You know my owner, right?” Heimish was probably saying to the older boys, making the secret jerk-off motion with his paw. “Big time.”

Shlomo ducked three dentists, an obstetrician and a lawyer before running face first into Mrs. Malinowitz's tremendous bosom. Mrs. Malinowitz was sixty-two years old and grossly overweight, but Shlomo couldn't resist pausing for just one split second to nuzzle gently between her pendulous breasts.

She smelled of gefilte fish and Chanel.

Shlomo knew most of Mrs. Malinowitz was plain old fat, but he didn't really care. Whatever percentage of the tits engulfing his face was fat, some of it was definitely genuine tit.

“He's probably jerking off right now,” Heimish would be telling the boys. They'd all be laughing and high-fiving each other at Shlomo's expense.

“Tell your mother I said ‘Good Shabbos,'” said Mrs. Malinowitz as Shlomo hurried through the heavy front door.

Heimish stood up and started wagging his tail. The older boys had already gone.

“Mrs. Malinowitz?” asked Heimish. “You've got to be kidding me!
Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife!”

Shlomo stomped furiously toward him.

“Get!” he said harshly. “Get! Go on!” Heimish didn't budge. Shlomo reached into his suit jacket, pulled out the magazine and rolled it tightly. He swung it at Heimish with all his might.

“Away!” he said.

Shlomo swung again.

Heimish ducked, his tail between his legs. Heimish wasn't sure whether Shlomo was playing with him or not. Shlomo swung the magazine again, this time hitting Heimish squarely on his left haunch.

“Bad dog!” Shlomo shouted. “Go home!”

Heimish knew he wasn't playing now. Shlomo raised the magazine above his head again, and Heimish darted into the busy street.

The driver of the car never saw him. She only stepped on the brakes after feeling a thump coming from under the left rear tire.

“Ohmigod!” she cried.

She had been on her way to the movies.

She was blond.

Her T-shirt said P
ORN STAR
.

That night, Shlomo sat in bed with his knees drawn up to his chest, the
Juggs
magazine opened on the bed beside him. He missed Heimish, but he was glad to finally be alone with Kimberley Kupps and Wendy Whoppers and Nikki Knockers.

“You call that a penis?” Nikki said to him.

He felt ashamed.

He worried that God would punish him.

He had been told by his rabbis that if you kill a living being or in any way cause it to die, then when you die and go to hell, your arms and legs are tied to four different horses and a gun is fired into the air and the horses bolt, tearing you to pieces.