Miracles Ain't What They Used to Be Read online

  “Fuck you,” Billie Sue said.

  “I’ve had better when I didn’t have any,” Mike said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Billie Sue said.

  “It means it stunk.”

  “Well hell,” she said, “by the time you was there, there had been eight others.”

  “That explains it then,” Mike said. “Come on, Hap. Let’s go.”

  “I didn’t bring a car,” I said.

  “He came with me,” Ed said. “I knew he was going to embarrass me like this, I wouldn’t have brought him.”

  “It’s all right,” Billie Sue said. “I don’t expect to be universally admired.”

  “You deserve respect,” Ed said. “He can walk home, all I care.”

  “I got a car,” Mike said.

  I went with Mike and he drove us out of there in his ’62 Impala.

  We rode down off the hill, out of the night, into the glowing lights of the houses along the way, and then into the brighter lights of the Dairy Queen by the highway. Mike parked in the Dairy Queen lot and we went inside, ordered hamburgers and Cokes. Mike went to the bathroom while the burgers were cooking. I picked us a table at the rear of the place and sat down. There was no one else there but us and the cook and the fellow at the register. Ed came back, sat and said, “I really needed to wash up. I touched her a little. Not on purpose, but trying to guide it in, you know?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I’m not trying to make you feel bad about not doing it,” he said.

  “I don’t feel bad.”

  “She’s okay with it,” Mike said. “She likes it fine. It’s a hobby.”

  “I know.”

  “She did ten guys last year, and this year she was going for twelve. She did eleven.”

  “Guess I messed up her record.”

  “She really had her heart set on twelve.”

  “Life is full of little disappointments,” I said.

  The burgers and drinks were called. We went up and got them and brought them back to the table.

  “That stuff they said out there, about you being queer,” Mike said, and turned his head a little when he spoke again. “You know, you’re like that, it’s okay with me. I’ve known a few. My uncle Bill was that way. One time I caught him sucking a schoolteacher’s dick in our living room. He thought I was out, but I was in the bedroom reading. My uncle was a teacher too. He taught art. The guy’s dick he was sucking, I don’t remember what he taught. Speech or something.”

  “No. I’m not like that,” I said.

  “You know that colored fella you hang with?”

  “Leonard?”

  “He’s queer.”

  “I know.”

  “It bother you?” Mike asked. “Not him being colored, but the queer part.”

  “Some at first. I guess I didn’t know what to make of it. He seems like everyone else to me, except for the dick sucking part. He doesn’t hide it any. I figure he’ll get killed on account of it. Hell, I might get killed on account of it, I keep hanging around with him. I like him though. He’s one tough sucker. He can be funny.”

  “I don’t think of him as funny.”

  “He can be.”

  “I think it would take one tough customer to kill that nigger,” Mike said.

  “I don’t think he likes being called a nigger. I’d stick with colored.”

  “That’s something, ain’t it. Don’t call him nigger, but queer is all right.”

  “I think he does say he’s queer. Says it plain and simple. I think he wouldn’t want someone else to call him that, though. I know I wouldn’t advise it.”

  “About the queer stuff, don’t misunderstand me. I don’t mind he is. Shit, right circumstances, I’d try it.”

  “What?”

  “Sucking a dick.”

  “Oh.”

  “You?” he asked, and buried his face in his hamburger.

  “Not on your life,” I said. “I’m okay Leonard wants to do it. He’s my friend. But I don’t want no snapshots of it, diagrams and such. I like pussy just fine. Just didn’t like that one tonight. I’m ashamed I went out there. I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I sure wouldn’t want my girlfriend to know I went out there.”

  “You have a girlfriend?”

  “Not right now. But if I had one, I wouldn’t want her to know.”

  “Course not,” Mike said, and nodded his head. “Understand, I was just posing a possible situation. A what if. I wasn’t suggesting you and me might do such a thing. Suck each other’s dick, I mean.”

  I got it then. I said, “But you fucked her.”

  He cleared his throat a little and took a sip of Coke.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Sure. It was fine. She was fat and a little sticky, but it was fine. I didn’t mean what you think I meant. That wasn’t what I was talking about. Not really. I was just talking.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Don’t say anything to anybody,” he said. “They might get the wrong idea.”

  “No problem.”

  “Hey, I’ll drop you off.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  We finished our burgers without talking and went out to his car.

  He drove us away. He knew where I lived.

  “How about the team this year?” he said. “I think we’re going to stomp shit out of Mineola.”

  “It could happen,” I said, as if I knew the first thing about football. I’d been to one game and that was so I could watch a girl I liked lead the cheers. She left with a football player and I left with some popcorn.

  When Mike pulled up in my yard he cut the headlights so they didn’t shine in the house windows and stir my parents. I opened my door, and that turned on the overhead light. I said, “Thanks for the ride. See you later.”

  “Hey, just to be clear,” he said, “I was just kidding earlier, but it might have sounded like, you know—”

  “No,” I said. “It’s good. I get it.”

  He looked at me there in the glow of the overhead light. He knew I got it all right.

  I wanted to say something else to him, but I couldn’t come up with anything. I closed the door and he drove away. It was, for a weekend, a short night.

  I saw him at school after that. He always smiled and said hi, but he never sat with me at lunch, and he didn’t spend any time with me when we crossed paths. After a while I didn’t see him around anymore and I heard later from Leonard that he moved off to some place up north with his family.

  MIRACLES AIN’T WHAT

  THEY USED TO BE

  IT WAS MY ORIGINAL intent to write this as a well-measured, reasonable, and not at all angry or sarcastic piece on people who believe in religious miracles.

  It didn’t work out that way. And I didn’t stay entirely on target.

  Hitch up your drawers, here goes.

  Miracles ain’t what they used to be, but according to those who believe in them, they’re as common as a politician’s promise, maybe more so. There’s Uncle Willie who stroked out on the operating table, but came back after he got a jolt of electricity with the paddles, and now he’s right as rain, back smoking cigars, eating greasy pork, watching the Playboy Channel and telling you how he saw angels on the Other Side, all of them properly clothed, mind you. He only looks at nudes here in this here world. He saw those folks on the other side while he was deader than a no-interest bank loan. The angels came walking down a corridor of light, beckoning to him, but he heard a voice say, “It’s not your time, Willie. I was just fucking with you, and I’m sending you back.”

  Or there’s Aunt Ethel who came in from the rain and accidentally stuck her wet finger against a light socket and blew out all her house lights and all those in the neighborhood, catching Mrs. Sanders next door right in the middle of a vibrator episode that spoiled her close-touch with temporary nirvana. (Talk about fucking up a real religion—sexual gratification.)

  Aunt Ethel was sent reeling across eternity in a white ni
ghtgown and bunny slippers (why not?) to see the bright, white light in the tunnel and the friendly face of a long-dead relative, smiling like a Walmart greeter.

  And then, of course, Aunt Ethel was jerked back, coming around on the kitchen floor in a pool of urine and a pile of shit. She was dead, she’ll tell you. But the Lord had other plans (which he obviously didn’t share with the grinning greeter in the light tunnel) and brought her back because she is just so special, so special that you have to rehear her story so often that you begin to think there is no justice in death if it can’t be final, and that whoever said life is short has never been trapped in a room with Aunt Ethel and the glorifying moment of her near-death experience. Only a poetry reading can seem as interminable.

  According to these kinds of stories, the angels waiting in that corridor of light are frequently people the part-time-dead folk knew when alive. Often, they turn out to be relatives, or close friends who have gone on before, and have not aged.

  We don’t hear as often from those not traveling toward the light.

  Maybe their glimpse of the other place was too unsavory to share. Who wants to hear about the warm and greasy slopes of Hell, where sinners end up making fiery license plates for Satan’s magnificent, flame-colored fleet of DeSoto automobiles? Why Satan drives a DeSoto is a mystery, but there you have it. If there’s a God I think he’d drive a Prius, environmental concerns and all, though those Teslas are way cool and can run like a spotted-ass ape, as my dad used to say. I have never figured out how come he was so familiar with spotted-ass apes.

  Besides, if a Tesla is good enough for George R.R. Martin, why not God?

  But I digress.

  However this near-death experience is perceived, it is almost always declared a miracle because Uncle Willie, or Aunt Ethel, or someone like them, was dead as a brick on the operating table, or lying cool in their own waste, or tangled in a car wreck, and have come back alive! God brought them back because he had work for them to do here on earth, work which very nearly always seems to involve annoying evangelism or writing another book about how Heaven is real and the Bible is the word, even though instructionally it’s more confusing and contradictory than internet articles on understanding string theory.

  Growing up, going to church, I listened to the preachers and did as they suggested. “Read your Bible.”

  Holy shit! That cured me of Christianity.

  According to the Bible, homosexuality is a sin, but a large number of other sins are mentioned as well. There are also privileges, such as the right of a male head of a household to sell his daughters into slavery (providing the price is right), and there are even sections that say you have the right to stone your son or brother if they are drunkards. According to the Bible you can also kill people who work on Sunday. (After they have given you your change, I guess.) There are lots of instructions about not eating shellfish and pork, and so on, but most Christians aren’t even aware of this long and tedious list. They only know of the Ten Commandments, not the hundreds of others.

  You’re not even supposed to touch pork, or a dead pig, let alone eat it, because it is considered an unclean animal; to touch it is sinful. Football players pass the skin of a dead pig around every Sunday, but you don’t see the haters of homosexuals rising up from their shellfish dinners and pork chops to scream about this abomination. You don’t see them admonishing their wives for wearing garments with two different kinds of thread, though the Old Testament expressly speaks out against it. Hell, even the New Testament is tough on pigs. Jesus pulls the demons out of a man and puts them into a herd of swine and causes the swine to run into the river until they are “choked.”

  What did those poor swine ever do to Jesus?

  To continue in this vein, the Old Testament is against hybrids of any kind. Do not mix different breeds of cattle, do not mix different types of plants. And I hope you aren’t eating Big Boy tomatoes, cause those babies are cross-bred, and eating them will put you on a juicy, tasty road to Hell.

  But the news here, Old and New Testament, is that the Good Book is tough on pigs and anything piggy, including all manner of pig products. That would include pigskin snacks, pork sausage, a lot of hot dogs, as well as the aforementioned football, and—well, the list is astronomical. How many different kinds of threads are mixed into our daily fabrics? If you are making the case that you are a stern believer in biblical commands, then do you get to pick and choose the ones you like and discard those that may deny you some seriously cool outfits and interfere with your Sunday TV schedule, where you see two teams of millionaires not only passing a pigskin but violating the holy law about working on Sunday? Football is their job.

  So what it generally boils down to is “Kill the queer and pass the football.”

  Suspect one thing in the Bible as bullshit, and you find yourself checking your shoes repeatedly as you wander through the theological pasture. This includes miracles. First, did they really happen; and if so, then why are modern miracles a whole lot less miraculous?

  The miracle that allowed Uncle Willie or Aunt Ethel to come back to us is nearly always assisted by doctors with years of medical training and hardworking nurses, as well as the best technology the hospital can afford. This is given short shrift. The formerly dead visitors don’t come back from their well-lit vacation saying, “Thank you, doctors and nurses.” Instead, they thank God or Jesus. (The Holy Ghost goes wanting. That guy gets no respect.)

  The usual justification for thanking God is that God used the doctors to do his will. If a person gets well, thank God and Jesus, and if it turns out bad, it was a heavenly plan. You can’t beat a religion that is always right, not matter how contradictory.

  Little Johnny has a Lego lodged up his nose and the doctors can’t seem to get it out, but if they do, God has answered prayers. If little Johnny expires with the Lego still up his nose, then it was God’s will that he be buried in a J.C. Penney suit and tie, and since only the top half of the coffin has to be opened, you can save on shoes.

  Sometimes, like my fictional Aunt Ethel, these so-called dead come around, having visited Heaven’s gate without luggage, and having brought nothing in the way of gifts back from the greeters, not even a coupon for twenty percent off angel wings and golden halos, the latter being about as useful as a gimme hat without a bill. The wings would be nice, however. It would take you less time to get to Walmart.

  These added things are not actually part of the Bible, but I think Walmart may eventually be added, as many Christians I know buy their pork and shrimp and mixed-thread clothing there, or hammers and nails so they can work on Sunday.

  As for returning from the dead, if you suggest that it may not be so much a miracle as medical training at work, these celestial adventurers who have been cast back into everyday life are as offended and angry as a child who’s been told by some snot-nosed kid that the Tooth Fairy is a crock of shit, and it’s your parents who drink the milk and eat the cookies you put out for Santa Claus.

  God is the adult Santa Claus, and what’s weird, he doesn’t even leave a quarter under your pillow or put presents under a tree. It doesn’t stop people from praying for money and cars and houses and longer dicks, but he never delivers. Though if by some coincidence you end up with money from a dead relative and find you can in fact afford a double-wide and a week’s supply of Tall Boys, God gets the credit, even though everything else you asked for was denied. Fact is, life’s lottery works pretty much the same for everybody. Sometimes you land on red, and sometimes you land on black. Sometimes it’s snake eyes, and sometimes it’s seven-come-eleven.

  If God can give us rain, he can give us storms and earthquakes and forest fires, as well as Justin Bieber and the Kardashians. If he’s all-powerful and responsible for everything, then he’s to blame or praise for everything. It’s only fair.

  You can’t just decide he’s praiseworthy for the stuff you like. If there’s an all-powerful deity he plays both sides of the street—and he’s not averse to luring you o
ut into the middle of it when a car is coming.

  So let’s say Homer Smith has just survived a tornado in the mobile home park where he lives.

  “Well, here’s how it was. I was sitting there in my double-wide, watching Duck Dynasty, and I heard this roaring like a train, and I looked out the winder there, and, holy moly guacamole, but here come a big ole twister, black as the hole to China, a twirling around and around, and it jumped right into the trailer park. I seen there was a dog and a car in that twister and all manner of junk, everything except my ex-wife, which I admit, forgive me Jesus, I slightly hoped for, and that damn tornado wiped out the entire park, wadded up my trailer like an aluminum can and carried me away. I woke up in a ditch (always a ditch) and I was alive. Everyone else in the trailer park was killed, including a mother and her twenty-five children, bound up in a ball so you couldn’t tell where there was a head or where there was an ass, and there was a college student torn apart, as well as some educated fellow about to get his doctorate in the study of heart surgery. He got twisted up like a butter rope. But you know what God done? He said, ‘To hell with them people. I love Homer,’ (which is my name, though some folks call me Home) ‘and I’m gonna save his bony ass and three teeth’ (one of them, a front tooth, is a little dodgy and hanging by a thread) ‘because Homer is far more precious to me than children and doctors and college students and such who may do great things.’

  “I got to agree with him, cause here I am. And I say to that, ‘God, thank you for your kindness and your wisdom, and for killing the shit out of them other unfortunates but not me. Also, a couple of beers were spared, and I want to thank your happy ass for that as well. I drank them beers and looked at the heavens and the corpses in the driveway, and wondered at your magnificence. Amen. P.S. I did get my car dinged, so you weren’t entirely on the money. I won’t be in church this Sunday.’”

  Okay, Homer is a real moron, but frankly, this isn’t that different from interviews I’ve seen on TV with the survivors of tornados. Even smart and reasonable people tend to believe that they have been spared because God sees them as special, unlike those who now have a microwave up their ass.