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Grandma would get this look on her face whenever confronted with one of my accidental blasphemies. A look sharp as a nun's ruler snapped across the top of the hands. Her butterscotch halo would flicker in those moments and an afternoon scotch induced smile curled into a snarl capable of making many a devil quiver.
But the truth was I had no devil, nor any angels, to offer for the quivering and that was the problem.
Okay, so here's the situation. When I was a kid every summer my parents would fly me and my just barely passing enough to graduate report card to spend a few weeks with my grandparents down in a South Floridian trailer park. A vacation ostensibly for me. However, watching my parents check off the calendar with mounting glee the week before, along with the not so subtle high-five they exchanged as I boarded the plane, planted suspicions as to whose benefit this trip was actually intended. At the time of the offense it was day four or five into the trip. One of those subtropical lazy afternoons with nothing but game shows on TV and a box fan propped in front of the screen door for air-conditioning.
In a puddle of sweat I was splayed out on the floor with a Pride Parade's worth of He-Man dolls scattered about me. I had them battling it out in a makeshift fortress assembled out of crime novels plucked from my grandfather's library. When Grandma came in upon the scene after talking with the leather tanned mummy that lived in the trailer next door she was shocked. Not at the sight of her grandchild playing with questionably S&M friendly steroid barbarians on a paperback fortress of lurid thrillers. No she immediately zeroed in on the pièce de résistance. Skeletor straddling the ornate cross that hung on the wood paneled living room wall which had been appropriated in the name of global conquest to double as a death ray cannon.
All of which I explained to her patiently, then adding with a growing awareness of her wrath, that I was going to hang it back up when I was done.
In answer to the question - "What's the problem here?" - my demeanor seemed to be asking with a shrug of honest confusion, was a yank of the ear that lifted me up as far as my knees and a kick to the ass in order that some sense might be jostled for the efforts.
Only because she knew my parents were atheists did she hold off on the whooping she would have delivered to a properly churched grandson. She asked me if I knew who the pewter action-figure sized man on the wooden cross was?
My parents of course, whose appreciation for the religious went no further than the aesthetic for my father and as one of many worthy opponents for mom, had given me the basics. One told me Jesus was an actual man who lived long ago and whom some professed was the son of the imaginary friend my friends at school said was real. Which was fine by me, I just never understood why they insisted theirs was real while mine was not. The other told me he was just another slave-god propped up to keep the people spiritually fattened so as not to slip the chains of mediocrity with which their masters bound them.
Once the short version of this answer had been properly washed with soap from my mouth she dragged me back to the living room. Then, with a light of a 120 cigarette dangling out of her turtle scowl, she proceeded to wave the cross before me again in hopes of vampire-repelling whatever demonic shenanigans that had taken root within. With the fury, with the passion, I was told that before me was the best friend either I, my parents, or the people who thought like them could ever know. Or would be if only they weren't so pig headed about insisting he wasn't really who he said he was.
Grandma looked down and saw the innocent confusion in my eyes. While it was clear that I perfectly capable of understanding how a ninja could be the most valuable asset on a modern battlefield or how a man born with strange mutant abilities would take up costumed vigilantism as a pastime, somehow the whole virgin birth of a savior who came back from the dead to rocket up into the heavens thing was completely beyond even my borderline autism sense of wonder.
She lowered the cross and with a drawn out drag off her cigarette she appraised the conundrum I presented before her. I had known this particular look quite well as it was reflected in mom whenever she would do the Times crossword puzzle over morning coffee. What's a four letter word for an oblivious little brat?
"Jack." My name spoken with gray smoke across the blood orange sunlight between us, "Has it ever occurred to you that something doesn't have to have been proven in order for it to be real?"
"Well to be honest, Grandma, we only touched on epistemology briefly in the 6th grade, I think it was somewhere between having Kid Neanderthal launch a dodge ball at my still burgeoning genitalia and memorizing the three branches of Government. Therefore I am both ignorant and fascinated by the paradox you have proposed." Which is what my baffled nod attempted to convey to her.
"The people in your comic books aren't real, are they?"
I shook my head negative.
"But does that make the thrill you get from reading their adventures any less real? Is the satisfaction you get from pretending to be one of them any less real? How about all those pictures you draw? Is that inspiration, is that wonder real or not real because it can't be seen behind a microscope?"
With much deliberation I offered a trepidatious no.
"Of course not. That's what Jesus does for me and your grandfather and a lot of us actually. You don't have to believe he's real, but you should give them the same respect you want them to give to you. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"
I did .
Or at least I thought I did until later that night. I slept in the living room on a fold out couch. I kept the fan inches from my face and the TV on with the sound turned off so as not to wake anyone. To the crackle of electrocuted insects just barely audible over the fan's white noise I drifted off to sleep.
When I awoke it was to a strange hand under the sheets, with itchy fingers climbing up a belly plump on grandma's home cooking. The TV was still on and some sex zombie was hawking infomercial exercise machinery. I looked around the person who was messing with me and saw no one there even as the hand inched towards my chest. I threw back the sheets confused and in the radon blue of insomnia TV there was the biggest spider I had ever seen. This thing was huge. Saturday morning cartoon huge. Movie huge. Stupid huge. It's body was wide as a hamburger patty. 8 furry legs hunched squat at the zenith of my belly. A crown of onyx alien eyes stared back into my terror from a ping-pong ball sized head and its mandibles clicked with venomous hunger.
Frozen. My knowledge of arachnids consisted of the following facts. They were not bugs and when irradiated could potentially instill super-powers in teenagers through a bite. Non-radioactive spiders meanwhile tended to be poisonous with some capable of killing a full grown primate with a single bite. I wanted to scream, to jump up, to run away, to the airport, where I'll board the first flight back to New York where the local vermin didn't count the genus of 'Face-Hugger' amongst its ranks.
But doing that would only lead to the inevitable, non-super power giving bite and I'd probably be dead or wrapped in a cocoon to be incubated with spider-eggs. What a way for grandma to find me.
"Back off, ugly!" A miniscule high-pitched voice shouted and out of the dark the pewter action figure sized Jesus jumped down right where my hand would land during the Pledge of Allegiance. Armed with one of Grandma's crochet needles, he twirled it around his body, over his heads and did a series of acrobatic flips that landed him directly between the tarantula doom and the breeding ground my slack jawed shock presented it.
"Now just so you know this is how this shit's gonna go down." The diminutive messiah squeaked and twirled the point of the needle directly in front of the spider's face. "The easy way with you fucking off back to wherever hell-whore's hole you crawled out of. Or the hard way. With me busting a crochet needle up in your ass. What's it gonna be, son? You think you have the balls to do what Judas, Pontius and Lucifer couldn't?"
If the furry spider could blink it would have. Instead it pondered the strange creature before it with more curiosity than concern. Across the belly I could feel the dagger tips of its legs dig in as it tensed up and then launched itself into a pounce towards Action Figure Sized Jesus.
With a thrust of the needle he took out an eye as the creature's mandible bit into my savior's side.
"Sonuvabitch!" He howled and thrust the needle deeper into the beast's head as the mandibles continued to bite away mechanically.
The whole fight was over in less than a minute. What was left of the creature rolled off my body, spontaneously combusted with a pyrotechnic lavish and evaporated into a cloud of slime green smoke.
Action Figure Sized Jesus, having seen that his work was done, dropped to his knees exhausted and gasped for me to pick him up and lift him to my ear.
When I complied he told me with a voice as faint as a man's conscience on Saturday night. He confessed he was dying. The bite had been right in the old Spear of Destiny wound. There wasn't much time. There was only one thing I could do.
"I know what to do." I told Action Figure Sized Jesus and with closed eyes but open heart spoke my healing prayer out loud. "I do, I do, I do believe in Jesuses..."
"Kid." The little guy found strength in his outrage to squeak over me. "What are you doing?"
"Isn't this how you bring magical creatures back to life?"
"That's faeries you're thinking of." He sighed. "Now listen up. This is really important. It's too late for me. I'm going to die a slow, agonizing death that will take hours. But you can help. I mean you do want to help a pal out after he just did you a solid, right?"
"Of course, Action Figure Sized Jesus."
"Good. Then listen up carefully."
I pulled him closer to my ear.
"I want you..."
"Yes."
"I want you to..."
"Yes, go on."
"I want you to snap my neck."
"What?" I recoiled and in my shock squeezed a little too hard eliciting a tinny groan from my savior.
"You heard me. You gotta act quick. The paralysis is starting to sink in and I won't be able to talk anymore."
"..."
"C'mon, kid. I died if not for your sins then at least so a giant fuckin' tarantula didn't do unspeakable things with your paralyzed body. Just... just do it quick. When I'm not expec..."
SNAP! I twisted the tiny head between thumb and forefinger.
Action Figure Sized Jesus went limp in my hands.
I got up and walked slowly toward the empty cross that hung on the wall. Gently I affixed his lifeless body back on there, pegging the hands and ankles into the little stigmatas that awaited. From there I went into the kitchen. Drank a few gulps of milk straight from the gallon. Nibbled on some leftovers from the fridge. Picked up the dustpan and foxtail. Walked back in to the living room. Swept up the ashes of the tarantula. Tossed it out the screen door. Put the dustpan and foxtail back. Walked back into the living room, got back into the couch-bed, watched a few seconds of mute infomercial babble and passed back out.
But the truth was I had no devil, nor any angels, to offer for the quivering and that was the problem.
Okay, so here's the situation. When I was a kid every summer my parents would fly me and my just barely passing enough to graduate report card to spend a few weeks with my grandparents down in a South Floridian trailer park. A vacation ostensibly for me. However, watching my parents check off the calendar with mounting glee the week before, along with the not so subtle high-five they exchanged as I boarded the plane, planted suspicions as to whose benefit this trip was actually intended. At the time of the offense it was day four or five into the trip. One of those subtropical lazy afternoons with nothing but game shows on TV and a box fan propped in front of the screen door for air-conditioning.
In a puddle of sweat I was splayed out on the floor with a Pride Parade's worth of He-Man dolls scattered about me. I had them battling it out in a makeshift fortress assembled out of crime novels plucked from my grandfather's library. When Grandma came in upon the scene after talking with the leather tanned mummy that lived in the trailer next door she was shocked. Not at the sight of her grandchild playing with questionably S&M friendly steroid barbarians on a paperback fortress of lurid thrillers. No she immediately zeroed in on the pièce de résistance. Skeletor straddling the ornate cross that hung on the wood paneled living room wall which had been appropriated in the name of global conquest to double as a death ray cannon.
All of which I explained to her patiently, then adding with a growing awareness of her wrath, that I was going to hang it back up when I was done.
In answer to the question - "What's the problem here?" - my demeanor seemed to be asking with a shrug of honest confusion, was a yank of the ear that lifted me up as far as my knees and a kick to the ass in order that some sense might be jostled for the efforts.
Only because she knew my parents were atheists did she hold off on the whooping she would have delivered to a properly churched grandson. She asked me if I knew who the pewter action-figure sized man on the wooden cross was?
My parents of course, whose appreciation for the religious went no further than the aesthetic for my father and as one of many worthy opponents for mom, had given me the basics. One told me Jesus was an actual man who lived long ago and whom some professed was the son of the imaginary friend my friends at school said was real. Which was fine by me, I just never understood why they insisted theirs was real while mine was not. The other told me he was just another slave-god propped up to keep the people spiritually fattened so as not to slip the chains of mediocrity with which their masters bound them.
Once the short version of this answer had been properly washed with soap from my mouth she dragged me back to the living room. Then, with a light of a 120 cigarette dangling out of her turtle scowl, she proceeded to wave the cross before me again in hopes of vampire-repelling whatever demonic shenanigans that had taken root within. With the fury, with the passion, I was told that before me was the best friend either I, my parents, or the people who thought like them could ever know. Or would be if only they weren't so pig headed about insisting he wasn't really who he said he was.
Grandma looked down and saw the innocent confusion in my eyes. While it was clear that I perfectly capable of understanding how a ninja could be the most valuable asset on a modern battlefield or how a man born with strange mutant abilities would take up costumed vigilantism as a pastime, somehow the whole virgin birth of a savior who came back from the dead to rocket up into the heavens thing was completely beyond even my borderline autism sense of wonder.
She lowered the cross and with a drawn out drag off her cigarette she appraised the conundrum I presented before her. I had known this particular look quite well as it was reflected in mom whenever she would do the Times crossword puzzle over morning coffee. What's a four letter word for an oblivious little brat?
"Jack." My name spoken with gray smoke across the blood orange sunlight between us, "Has it ever occurred to you that something doesn't have to have been proven in order for it to be real?"
"Well to be honest, Grandma, we only touched on epistemology briefly in the 6th grade, I think it was somewhere between having Kid Neanderthal launch a dodge ball at my still burgeoning genitalia and memorizing the three branches of Government. Therefore I am both ignorant and fascinated by the paradox you have proposed." Which is what my baffled nod attempted to convey to her.
"The people in your comic books aren't real, are they?"
I shook my head negative.
"But does that make the thrill you get from reading their adventures any less real? Is the satisfaction you get from pretending to be one of them any less real? How about all those pictures you draw? Is that inspiration, is that wonder real or not real because it can't be seen behind a microscope?"
With much deliberation I offered a trepidatious no.
"Of course not. That's what Jesus does for me and your grandfather and a lot of us actually. You don't have to believe he's real, but you should give them the same respect you want them to give to you. Do you understand what I'm telling you?"
I did .
Or at least I thought I did until later that night. I slept in the living room on a fold out couch. I kept the fan inches from my face and the TV on with the sound turned off so as not to wake anyone. To the crackle of electrocuted insects just barely audible over the fan's white noise I drifted off to sleep.
When I awoke it was to a strange hand under the sheets, with itchy fingers climbing up a belly plump on grandma's home cooking. The TV was still on and some sex zombie was hawking infomercial exercise machinery. I looked around the person who was messing with me and saw no one there even as the hand inched towards my chest. I threw back the sheets confused and in the radon blue of insomnia TV there was the biggest spider I had ever seen. This thing was huge. Saturday morning cartoon huge. Movie huge. Stupid huge. It's body was wide as a hamburger patty. 8 furry legs hunched squat at the zenith of my belly. A crown of onyx alien eyes stared back into my terror from a ping-pong ball sized head and its mandibles clicked with venomous hunger.
Frozen. My knowledge of arachnids consisted of the following facts. They were not bugs and when irradiated could potentially instill super-powers in teenagers through a bite. Non-radioactive spiders meanwhile tended to be poisonous with some capable of killing a full grown primate with a single bite. I wanted to scream, to jump up, to run away, to the airport, where I'll board the first flight back to New York where the local vermin didn't count the genus of 'Face-Hugger' amongst its ranks.
But doing that would only lead to the inevitable, non-super power giving bite and I'd probably be dead or wrapped in a cocoon to be incubated with spider-eggs. What a way for grandma to find me.
"Back off, ugly!" A miniscule high-pitched voice shouted and out of the dark the pewter action figure sized Jesus jumped down right where my hand would land during the Pledge of Allegiance. Armed with one of Grandma's crochet needles, he twirled it around his body, over his heads and did a series of acrobatic flips that landed him directly between the tarantula doom and the breeding ground my slack jawed shock presented it.
"Now just so you know this is how this shit's gonna go down." The diminutive messiah squeaked and twirled the point of the needle directly in front of the spider's face. "The easy way with you fucking off back to wherever hell-whore's hole you crawled out of. Or the hard way. With me busting a crochet needle up in your ass. What's it gonna be, son? You think you have the balls to do what Judas, Pontius and Lucifer couldn't?"
If the furry spider could blink it would have. Instead it pondered the strange creature before it with more curiosity than concern. Across the belly I could feel the dagger tips of its legs dig in as it tensed up and then launched itself into a pounce towards Action Figure Sized Jesus.
With a thrust of the needle he took out an eye as the creature's mandible bit into my savior's side.
"Sonuvabitch!" He howled and thrust the needle deeper into the beast's head as the mandibles continued to bite away mechanically.
The whole fight was over in less than a minute. What was left of the creature rolled off my body, spontaneously combusted with a pyrotechnic lavish and evaporated into a cloud of slime green smoke.
Action Figure Sized Jesus, having seen that his work was done, dropped to his knees exhausted and gasped for me to pick him up and lift him to my ear.
When I complied he told me with a voice as faint as a man's conscience on Saturday night. He confessed he was dying. The bite had been right in the old Spear of Destiny wound. There wasn't much time. There was only one thing I could do.
"I know what to do." I told Action Figure Sized Jesus and with closed eyes but open heart spoke my healing prayer out loud. "I do, I do, I do believe in Jesuses..."
"Kid." The little guy found strength in his outrage to squeak over me. "What are you doing?"
"Isn't this how you bring magical creatures back to life?"
"That's faeries you're thinking of." He sighed. "Now listen up. This is really important. It's too late for me. I'm going to die a slow, agonizing death that will take hours. But you can help. I mean you do want to help a pal out after he just did you a solid, right?"
"Of course, Action Figure Sized Jesus."
"Good. Then listen up carefully."
I pulled him closer to my ear.
"I want you..."
"Yes."
"I want you to..."
"Yes, go on."
"I want you to snap my neck."
"What?" I recoiled and in my shock squeezed a little too hard eliciting a tinny groan from my savior.
"You heard me. You gotta act quick. The paralysis is starting to sink in and I won't be able to talk anymore."
"..."
"C'mon, kid. I died if not for your sins then at least so a giant fuckin' tarantula didn't do unspeakable things with your paralyzed body. Just... just do it quick. When I'm not expec..."
SNAP! I twisted the tiny head between thumb and forefinger.
Action Figure Sized Jesus went limp in my hands.
I got up and walked slowly toward the empty cross that hung on the wall. Gently I affixed his lifeless body back on there, pegging the hands and ankles into the little stigmatas that awaited. From there I went into the kitchen. Drank a few gulps of milk straight from the gallon. Nibbled on some leftovers from the fridge. Picked up the dustpan and foxtail. Walked back in to the living room. Swept up the ashes of the tarantula. Tossed it out the screen door. Put the dustpan and foxtail back. Walked back into the living room, got back into the couch-bed, watched a few seconds of mute infomercial babble and passed back out.
