Originally published in Verbicide issue #8

I used to want to be a writer. I do not any more. Stories are lies, and when you tell a lie it makes Baby Jesus cry. I never really gave a damn about writing, anyway. I wanted to be a writer so I could live like a writer, expatriated in exotic places like Dublin and Tangiers, Barcelona and Lima. I wanted to run with the bulls and clash with the cops in the streets. I wanted to drink martinis in Cuba and tequila in Spain and shoot smack and smack my wife and bullshit like that. I wanted to live twice as hard and half as long. That’s what I had been taught: a mock Chick Tract with Elvis Presley nailed to a cross taught me that. But whether you live fast and die young, or die fast and live young, you’re just plum fucked from the jumpjump from the get go. I wanted to burn my candle at both ends, and I ended up burning my fingertips. I wanted to throw a brick through everybody’s comfortable livingroom window, and I came home to find it on my very own sofa! Mostly though, I wanted to be famous; I wanted little literary groupie girls to fuck me just for who I was. (“I’ve read all your work. You’re a geeenius.” Zzzzzzip! Slurrrpp!! Hot&sloppy, just the way I like it.)

I think that’s what Picasso did.

My masterpiece was to be called The Hong Kong Chicken Apocalypse, and it would win me the Nobel Fucking Prize for Literature. It would lead the people into a bigger and brighter beyond, an M&M Millennium. I would be bigger than Timothy Leary and L. Ron Hubbard combined, and my prose would make Vlad Nab cream trou like the JonBenet Ramsey issue of Playboy – and god dammit, it would get me laid. I even cut out pictures from Live Young Girls and pasted them to my desk to inspire me as I wrote.
…
I never finished it.

I wrote a few paragraphs I that liked and fruitlessly arranged and rearranged them. I filled notebooks with outlines, and mostly I dreamed about the sweet sweet scent of success, that day my day would come; but I had missed that exit long ago. I can’t remember when or where or why I finally gave it up for good, whether there was any epiphany or it just … faded away, man.

But listen. Just when you feel all hope is lost, the Waiter of Truth comes to your table, looking like a floating head in his tails in the dim light, and serves you up a Heaping Platter of God’s Love. It’s the color of lobster and you have to crack the shell to get at the meat, but it tastes more like asparagus with maybe a hint of blackberry and oak. Yes, just when you’re straight behind the 8-ball, when the Bald Heat is reigning down dystopic on your ass (always harass a brotha fer nuthin,) you will find a man that moves the hands that pull the rubber bands – a devil-chicken wiring telegraphic messages to the gods, a magic hat to conjure up purple-assed baboons to stomp the pigs and chase dem crazy baldheads out of town. Word up!

Or at least it is reasonable and sane to believe so.

What you have searched the Seven Seas in vain for – that needle-in-the-haystack, that Ziparumpazoo – it has been under your nose all along. You see, there is a better way, and it is not so hard a way as all that.

I remember my first taste of it. When I was a boy, Father and I went to Key Largo for vacation. While we were lying on the beach, he lost the keys to the rental car and became very mad. He went at that bastardly Buick with a piece of rusted rebar that he found on the shore, while I busied myself searching all afternoon up and down the beach for the keys, with no luck. The tide came and went. I combed the beach for half a mile in either direction. Finally, I couldn’t even remember where we’d originally been sitting. The beach stretched identical in both directions. Father had gone off somewhere for a drink. Frustrated, I gave up and fell to the sand. Stretching to sleep on the beach, I felt what I thought was a crab claw in my hand, and bolted up.

It was the keys of course. I felt like my plotline had got scripted onto a cheesy Tv show. I had never believed in God before that moment – never given it much thought really – but this was too precise, too ridiculous. Here was God winking at me and I was awed; and right then I knew God loved me just a little bit more than he loved everybody else. I keep that memory tucked away, and it pops up sometimes, just like the keys themselves, unbidden and exact; and I know.

That is the essence of it. Knowing that God loves you just a little bit more than He loves everybody else. And the only reason that God loves you a little bit more than He loves everybody else is because you know He loves you just a little bit more than he loves everybody else. ∞ + 1. A catch 22 in reverse.

But how do you begin this wondrous quest, you ask?

How did the big bang begin banging? It’s easy, you just

∞ + 1

Let me illustrate. When I was a kid, living with Father in Page, Missouri, I used to hike down to Box Springs to have a jump in the river. We called it Grasshopper Point. About eighty, ninety feet down, it seemed. And when you jumped, you’d hang in the air. Falling there, right next to the waterfall.

“Point your toes and hold your balls,” my imaginary friend, Coon Repup, would call as I stood pondering this leap of faith. I’d stand there up in the redrocks, watching the cars cross the cattle guard on Route 52B – so far down that you heard the sound come a second after you watched the car go over the grill. Made you think real hard about what was true and what was only your perception of the thing. It made my blood feel funny to think about how far down I had to go. I bet you couldn’t get a dog to do it. No way.

And when you jumped, you’d have seconds. Seconds of nothing – just you and the air – out there suspended; and you kind of heard the air going up past you, but mostly it was just time. Time of nothing. And then …

SPLASH!!!