Futile Efforts (38 page)

It had the worked up promotion of an Andy Warhol-type Factory alliance, where the artisans and contrivers gathered to film themselves shitting and sleeping and then presented it as art to anybody senseless enough to fall for it.
 
Word was now that if you went inside looking for a leather-death '
trix
to whip the hide off your ass, you could find her easy enough.
 
She'd be courteous and sweet and spit in your face only when you asked her to, and the salted ends of her cat-o'-nine-tails would help to heal the welts up quickly.
 
You wanted some home-stomped wine or Cuban cigars, a bestiality porno or a discussion group on nineteenth-century literature, or if you needed some guy to show you how to break your own thumbs to get out of high-tinsel steel cuffs, then you could just waltz right in, pick what you required and then backtrack out again.

But if you went with the intention of finding anything more, maybe looking for poetry to be carved into your heart, the agony of legend or a slap-down with God, seeking redemption or erasure of a dead past, then you joined with something more looming and immense along the way.
 
Until you carelessly grew into reckless myth and couldn't make it in the regular world anymore.

A writer named
Paynes
knew how to work the gaff and he'd hit it big with his first couple of books–bestseller lists, movie deals, television, all the rest of it.
 
He was out of his head, that much was obvious, but his timing had been perfect.
 
They needed somebody to stir the pot again.

Paynes
bought out nearly the entire city block, four or five warehouses at least, even the rubble of empty lots where the bag ladies and the zealots and the mainliners crawled among dog shit.
 
He'd spent time in the nuthatch and had brought the asylum sensibility back home with him.
 
From what I'd heard the space inside had now been split into a hundred separate areas, maybe more, including private suites, museums and exhibit halls.

There were even a couple of stages where circus acts trained the high- and low-wire routines, dancing French poodle performances, live theater where they played out scenes from Odets and Orton.
 
TV and film sets where they shot children's morning programs with lots of dinosaur costumes and moon-eyed puppets, and
pornos
with hermaphrodites ugly as three-toed tree sloths clambering on top of double amputee toothless dwarves.
 
It had its own irony, satire and breathless plausibility.
 
Madhouse.
 
Anything was possible, which I supposed was the whole point.

I watched the place engulf a
Fedex
carrier and two Chinese delivery kids in the course of a weekend.
 
Anyone with a crazy burning hurt who went inside the Works never came out again.

No one except my father, Nicodemus, and he only in a dream.

Come find me, son, in the blackest heart of Babylon
.

I figured this was the right place.
 
They said
Paynes
had gone so far inside that he couldn't be found again.
 
They said a bloody messiah stalked the halls, and that the devil chose his playmates carefully here.
 
It was about time.

The Works drew in the tormented and the lost and the defeated, and even a Southern tent revival minister in a frock coat could find a home for his insanity in this dwelling.
 
Maybe there was room for me too, but I doubted it.

Herzburg
whispered, "They got her."

"What?"

"Somebody carried off the dead whore.
 
Look up the block, you can watch her slicker swaying in the dark.
 
He's got her over his shoulder."

"That gruesome bastard–"

"He's having trouble handling her weight."
 
Herzburg
took a few steps forward until he was out on the avenue, and he finally cleared the hair from his eyes so he could see it happening.
 
"He's holding the top of her skull in place with one hand and dragging her away."

Juba scowled in that direction.
 
"It's to be expected."

"Stop saying that, Juba," I told him.
 
"Who the hell expects a murdered prostitute to be stripped clean on a street and her body stolen by some maniac?"

"We do," he said, and I bit my tongue until the coppery taste flooded down my throat because he was right.

I could see why my father had chosen the Works, and why the Works had chosen him.
 
There was a thriving audience here that desired to be entertained.
 
They wanted miracle and astonishment and resurrection.
 
They wanted to fuck all the blistering hate out of their miserable bones and so did my old man.
 
He could set up a soapbox in any corner and scream into their faces and slop up their sticky spirits.
 
He must be having the time of his life.

Nicodemus was in there somewhere, and he had my son Jonah with him.

Police prowled the area constantly but never at the right times.
 
They hit the cherry lights and blared the siren for two seconds at a clip, barely making a ripple in the sex action.
 
Nobody really noticed and the rats continued floating by.
 
The cops scooted out there without ever stepping from the car, amazed to have escaped once more.
 
News crews from the major networks came by twice but didn't exit their vans.
 
They shot the doorway and would use it later as file footage.
 
Frail and frightened husbands hunched under their steering wheels.
 
They all knew this was a borderland to stay clear from, but their peculiarities kept them coming back.
 
I had no doubt that they'd all eventually be swallowed by the Works.

"Are we ever going in?"
Hertzburg
asked.

"Yes," I said.

"And you're certain Nicodemus is inside?"

"Can't you smell him?"

"I smell piety.
 
But that could be you."

"It's all of us."

Juba grunted.
 
He tilted that oversized head and said, "What do they do with their hurt?"

"What the hell kind of question is that?"

"A simple one.
 
I haven't seen the doors open to let a single person out, not even to bring someone to the hospital or dispose of a body.
 
For that matter, what of their children?"

"They can't be breeding in there,"
Hertzburg
said.

"You sound so certain."

"Newborn life can't survive in that kind of atmosphere."

"No?" I asked.

"Absolutely not."
 
He said it with a flat dullness, arms crossed over the Tarzan outfit, trying to hold himself in tight.
 
"That ambiance is for dispossession.
 
Ruin and havoc, not for nurturing."

It was the only time I'd ever heard him sound so completely inane and foolish.
 
He talked out of shock, or maybe dread, which surprised me considering all he had seen.
 
Jolly Nell giggled, a warm and small sound like a young thin girl would make.
 
It almost brought a smile to my face as she threw her hands up, tired of us.
 
"If a baby can be born to a carnival, it can blossom here as well.
 
That's the nature of this place, I think.
 
It's only another sideshow."

"Maybe you're right, Nell," I said.
 
"It might explain why Nicodemus brought Jonah here."
 
I gritted my teeth until the hinges of my jaw hurt.
 
Blood called to blood, and the hammer of faith would have to fall one more time before we were through.
 
"Let's see what this
grift
is all about.
 
I'm going to find my son and then we're getting out of here."

"None of us will ever leave," Juba said from far above.
 
"Are you fully prepared for that?"

He started into the street, followed closely by the others.
 
Fishboy
Lenny splashed after them, waving his tiny flippers at me.
 
Juba's legs were so long that he made it across the avenue in three strides.
 
The moon rushed into the rain and poured silver down onto him.

I tried to figure out why nobody was paying attention to any of them.
 
Usually the whores loved freaks and made a big sloppy scene.
 
They smoothed
Herzburg's
hair, twining it between their fingers, playing with his spots.

Then I remembered.

He'd been murdered.
 
He was dead.

They were all dead, and I was consumed by ghosts.

2

I
had once been the greatest child preacher in all the South.
 
People had come from as far as Waycross, Tipton, Nashville, Greensboro, Deep River and Gainesville to listen to me wail about heavenly fire and the downfalls of sin.
 
The blaring prayers about saving of souls had come naturally to me.
 
Some of us are born to judgment.
 
I learned remorse early, but not atonement.

With a ministry that brought them bustling in across the floorboards of all-night gospel sings and tent revivals, I found I had a voice given to me by God.
 
I never called myself a healer, nor did my father, but that didn't stop the cripples from taking pain-wracked steps across the stage.
 
They hurled their hickory canes and sprang from their wheelchairs and flung their hearing aids into the eleventh row.
 
I gave the imploring, inspiring sermons needed to snap bones back into place and fling cancer into remission.
 
It was easy when backed by thousands of the devoted, everybody speaking in tongues, music swelling, arms lifted to paradise.
 
The brain can do amazing things, even in the dying and the maimed.

There is no mystery to Christ under the Big Top.
 
You had plenty of proof whenever you wanted it.
 
You needed only to watch the brain-damaged come and go without undergoing any change.
 
See the blessed who aren't susceptible to the power of placebo.
 
Their parents hoped for the miracle of the ordinary and urged them forward toward me and my microphone.
 
The retarded limped, as they always did, and hobbled beneath the lights and weight of the dedication, grinning before the shrieking audiences, and then hobbled off again.

My father's hands were full of cash.
 
He accepted personal checks and money orders, and he set up a system so he could take credit card donations.
 
He liked gaudy jewelry and wore large but flawed diamond rings that flashed the sun back into the eyes of my parishioners.

When he had both Jesus and money he didn't need the bottle anymore.
 
Nicodemus owned forty different silk suits and enjoyed driving through the poor sections of various towns throughout the panhandle of Florida, leaving stacks of crisp dollar bills in mailboxes and stuck inside broken screen doors.
 
He prayed with the Baptists, cleaned house with the Methodists, and baked bread in silence at a nearby monastery.
 
He rode on donkeys and went fishing with the governor.
 
He danced with the snake handlers yet never got close enough to the fangs.

But a child gets tired of what he's urged to do, even if he's started out in faith and love.
 
A love for the Word, and an incinerating love for his own father.
 
Eventually adolescence finds us all, and it drives most of us crazy in the wonderful way it's supposed to.

For other's it's the inferno.
 
I lost my golden voice when I discovered the moist tenderness of Becky May Horner and the raw rush of whiskey.
 
I gave up God in the middle of a blow job.

I suspect it happens like that more often than anyone wants to tell you.
 
The hidden mysteries of the tongue matter more than all the parables and allegory of the Bible.
 
In that moment, you realize a girl with large pink nipples and a tall glass of 80-proof of scotch can carry you further much faster than any archangel's wings.