When Holy Rollers get with their God, their halleluiah hands tremble like
leaves in gusts, their voices roar unknown tones, alien phonemes. Such
exaltation, such jump and shout. Those people know how to let it all hang
out.
How I envy them.
My God is soporific. A pothead. He loves to get lost in sounds, sights,
sensations. Quite often he forgets that she's God. Even forgets he's a gal
and sometimes attempts a urinal. "O Lordy," he sighs, piss all over her
divine legs. She giggles. "Gotta stop changing that water into wine." But
he knows that if she'd dared to sit, he'd have fallen asleep. And who knows
what would have happened then? Some Bible-thumper come in, find her and
crucify him? Well, no thanks she'd been through that once before. And
only days before hadn't she wept over Jerusalem? A garden gone to weed.
Better to jut drop out. Let them kill one other, hell, they're going to
anyway. Save your breath. Cultivate your garden. Thus my liturgy consists
mostly of grinning and giggling at my own thoughts.
But once I caught my God in an antic mood. He must have taken some new
drug. He was sitting on a parapet ledge of building in Seattle where I was
working on an air conditioner, and He was whistling Dixie. Not just
whistling it, but whistling it nostalgically.
"You're a dimwitted God," I said.
"I am, indeed," he said, "and you were made in my image."
"Fuck that, " I said. "I shine."
God guffawed at that and fell off the parapet.
I ran to the edge and looked down, ten stories. And there he was splat out
on the sidewalk.
"Oh, my God," I cried out, "Oh, my God, I've killed God."
Then I went into a dance and song:
"I killed God, O yes I did, I killed God and I'm proud of it."
Then God tapped me on the shoulder.
"Do you have any Tylenol," he said, "I think I landed on my head."
"Jesus!" I said, "You're alive again! You're not going to turn this into a
new religion, are you?"
"My people are studying the numbers," he said with a wink.
"Oh shit," I said, "of course! The South has finally risen, so then must
you."
"Bingo!" Jesus grinned.
Mike Geary Memphis
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