American Savior (20 page)

I did not go to college, but left home when I was seventeen, went to study dance in New York, yoga and meditation in Tibet and Nepal, then roamed the world meeting people, helping people, living in various disguises. In adult life, my roles have varied. I was the heart surgeon, the friendly waiter, the fellow who leapt out of his car to save a child who had fallen into the street, and on and on. The kidney donor who never wanted any attention, the philanthropist who remained anonymous. I surfaced in Fultonville, Massachusetts, at the ordained moment, as the Scriptures had indicated I would, and decided it was time to come out.” After that unfortunate choice of words he looked around at each of us and said, “Anything else?”

“What Scriptures?” I wanted to ask, “Which Scriptures were those?” But like everyone else in the room I could not get a word out just then. I think we were all ashamed. As soon as our opponents turned vicious, we had all traveled back to adolescence, when the wrong accusation at the wrong time would render us an outcast. I looked at Jesus then, looked at the earring, and I thought I was beginning to have an understanding. He was holding a mirror up to us so that we could see ourselves in all our dishonesty and fear and pettiness. He was planning on doing that for the whole nation, I suspected, as president, and I did not see how a candidate with an agenda like that had the remotest chance of winning the election. And at that moment, I was very sad.

“Where’s my pal, Stab?” Jesus asked mischievously.

“Out on a trail ride. We sent him away. We didn’t want him to have to face, you know, the accusations.”

“Which accusations are those? That he’s an affectionate soul? Which ones, exactly?”

“That he’s, that he might be a queer,” Dukey blurted out.

Jesus looked at him for a long moment. It wasn’t the nicest of motels, as I mentioned, nor the cleanest. In fact, there was a fine layer of dust or desert sand on the coffee table where the Son of Man had set his hairbrush. Without saying anything else, Jesus squatted down and began writing something in the dust with one finger. Dukey watched for a second like the rest of us, and then abruptly said, “I’ll get coffee for the whole gang,” and hurried out of the room. Jesus stopped writing, scuffed the letters away with one hand and said, “Everybody ready for the rodeo?”

TWENTY-FIVE

My mother told me, as we sat together in a quiet part of our rented bus on the way to the rodeo, that in the Bible there was a scene in which a group of men wanted to stone a woman for being an adulteress.

“That much I remember,” I told her.

“Good,” she said. “The Sunday school classes weren’t wasted. Do you remember what Jesus did?”

“He told them not to stone her. After that it’s a blur. I think he went on about it in his blog for a couple of weeks.”

She made a face. “He squatted down and started writing with his finger in the dust.”

‘’In some language no one understood, I bet.”

“Don’t be fresh. People understood, all right. He was writing down their sins, their secret sins. When they saw that he knew everything bad they had done and was getting ready to tell everybody, they all walked away.”

“To get coffee for the whole gang,” I suggested, but she did not catch the reference, and made a
tsk
with her tongue and teeth and looked sadly at her hands as if something had gone wrong along the way, and her son, after leaving the sane atmosphere of her home, failing at marriage, and abandoning the church … had become blasphemous. Successful and nice, a good boy, but irreverent to the point of blasphemy all the same.

I wanted to tell her it wasn’t blasphemy at all. I wanted to tell her
that humor was a kind of prayer for me, and that growing up Catholic with a Jewish father had been a great education, a twenty-year tutorial in the art of tolerance, in the value of appreciating the ancient wisdom, in looking for something beyond the everyday, something that didn’t die with the body. It was becoming clear to me that what Jesus wanted from us was not pious obedience to a narrow set of rules, but a smart, limitless open-mindedness that allowed us—in real life, in actual day-to-day, modern American life—to treat the other person the way we would want to be treated. Gay people, Jewish people, dumb people, rich people, poor people, women, men, right-wingers, liberals, soldiers, and antiwar protestors, maybe even animals—we were supposed to see through the disguise they were wearing, all the way down to the I AM in them. That was it. That was the big commandment, I was almost sure.

But I wasn’t sure how to say that to my mother, how to pick the right parable, the right symbol, the right phrase. So I wrapped an arm around her for a minute, and I said, “I’ve started to reread the Good Book, Ma. Because of you.”

Which made her happy, and cost me nothing.

T
HE
W
EST
E
DFORT
R
ODEO
turned out to be a huge affair, five thousand people probably, Native Americans, Mexicans, and New Mexicans, a lot of beef being barbecued and tortillas being fried, tobacco being chewed, and people wandering around in cowboy hats and decoratively stitched boots, their faces sun-darkened and dry. We hadn’t been able to rent the usual two limos anywhere in the vicinity, so we drove to the event in one of those half-sized school buses, a plain white banner with
JESUS FOR AMERICA
printed in red letters on the side. My mother had wanted to put a cross next to the letters, but Jesus would not allow it.

Maybe it was the poll numbers, or maybe the rumor of gayness had gotten around very quickly, because more than the usual number of reporters were waiting to meet us as we got off the bus. Standing on the top step, Jesus gave a brief statement saying he would be happy to answer everyone’s questions a bit later … but first he wanted to ride a bull. All of us—staff and press alike—smiled at this. Ride a bull. It was the type
of cute remark any candidate might come up with, something about liking maple syrup in New Hampshire or potatoes in Idaho, or being a big Crimson Tide fan in Alabama, a line intended to make the locals feel proud of whatever it was they had a reputation for being proud of. A nice line … except, as we soon learned, Jesus wasn’t joking.

From the edge of the crowd of reporters a real cowboy stepped forward, the boots, the hat, the sun-cooked skin. “I’m Jake,” he said. “Jake Best.” He reached out and gave Jesus a hearty clap on the back. It appeared, from this warm greeting, either that Jesus and Jake had known each other in a previous lifetime, or that Jesus had made arrangements on his own without telling us. “You ready, Boss? Got some duds for you to change into.”

And before any of us could stop him, our candidate was striding off in the direction of the corral, talking animatedly with Jake Best about things we could only guess at. There was nothing for us to do but follow. Nothing for the press to do, either. Like a swarm of ground hornets going after a bare ankle they buzzed excitedly toward the enclosure and took up positions around the fence and in the small grandstand. I had a seat there myself, squeezed between Wales and my mother. Zelda was handing out a short bio she’d printed up at the motel office: Jesus the West Texan, world traveler, yoga student, heart surgeon in disguise, anonymous organ donor. I felt like it had the potential to explode in our faces. What if he’d just made it all up? But, at that point there were no other options.

We watched a young Native American on a vicious black bull, his spine and neck whipped this way and that as the animal tried to buck him off its back. The young guy held on for the count of six and then went flying off the animal and landed with an audible thump in the dust, breaking, it seemed, his left wrist.

“Let’s have a hand for Austin Pine Needle,” the announcer was saying, as Austin hobbled off cradling the wrecked wrist with his good hand. We were all still clapping for him, and the mounted assistants were using their horses to nudge the black bull toward a gate … and there was Jesus, fitted out in jeans and a western shirt, leather gloves, boots, chaps, no helmet. He was in the fenced waiting area with one hand on the
wooden slat and the other hand gripping the strap that held him to the bull. Cameras were flashing, reporters scribbling. None of us could take our eyes off the man.

“This,” Wales said out of the side of his mouth, “is pure genius.”

“Either that or we end up doing a press conference from the orthopedic wing of the nearest hospital.”

“Watch. I have a good feeling.”

The bell sounded, the gate burst open, and out came Jesus on his bull. If Austin Pine Needle’s animal had been vicious, then this bull was a four-footed demon, a behemoth of muscle and horns that seemed to take it very personally that some human type had decided to perch on its spine. His hind legs kicked up higher than a basketball forward’s sweat-band. He spun like a car out of control on an icy road, kicked and bucked and twisted. And Jesus hung on, one arm whipping in circles, his earring flashing in the sun. He stayed up for an eight count that seemed like thirty, and then, letting out a happy whoop, allowed himself to be shucked off the bull’s back like so much loose skin. He went flying up in the air, arms flailing, and somehow managed to land on the soles of his boots. He trotted toward the gate as cool as any starting quarterback coming off the field with a big lead, and ducked between the slats of the fence where a trio of other cowboys slapped his shoulders and nodded their approval.

“Unbelievable,” Wales said.

Within seconds, the press was all over him. In fact, on that day, Jesus never was able to give the speech he had planned to give. His past remained clouded. The gay issue floated off into the northern distance, because all the major networks had headlines like the one in the
Amarillo Chronicle:
CANDIDATE CHRIST TAKES BULL BY HORNS
.

It was occurring to me that Jesus knew more about manipulating the American press machine than any of us did. That night, and on the Sunday morning political talk shows, the image that was shown again and again, until it etched itself into the national consciousness, was Jesus as Cowboy—which went a long way toward making the whole West Texas/Native American story believable and winning him votes in the
Southwest. Overnight he had become a man’s man. A stud. Men liked it. Republican women liked it. Gay men and gay women liked the fact that he had not rushed to distance himself from them by denying the earlier story. Conservatives swelled out their chests at the thought of a real cowboy, not another fake one, in the Oval Office. Liberals smiled indulgently and wondered aloud why anyone would risk breaking bones for the thrill of eight seconds on a bull. Jesus’s popularity soared in rural America, to the point where a week later the famous country music singer Andy Ray Pressbine came out with a song titled “Our American Savior, the Bull-Ridin’ Redneck.” It immediately went to the top of the charts. Pressbine volunteered to play for free at Jesus for America rallies throughout the south, and we were more than happy to accept his generous support.

Within a few days, thanks to diligent reporting by the
Minneapolis Star,
Johnston V. Paege Jr. was revealed to have been convicted, twice, of passing bad checks, and he soon was persona non grata on all but Harry “Hurry” Linneament’s radio show, which aired coast to coast on the ED Network. I liked to listen to that show in short bursts, though it always made me angry after a while—which probably was Linneament’s intention. I liked his voice and admired his authoritative tone. In any case, Hurry kept giving CPR to the story long after it was obviously dead, kept saying how he did not, simply did not understand how America could let something like this go so easily! When a Republican senator had been caught in an airport men’s room taking a wide stance and picking pieces of toilet paper up off the tiles, Hurry had argued the opposite point: watch the Democrats drag this out. Now he was the one doing the dragging.

Adding to our big week was a Newsweek/CBS poll taken two days after the rodeo that showed Jesus pulling ahead of Marjorie Maplewith by four points, one point over their margin of error.

However, once the cloud of sweet publicity began to fade like dust in the bull ring in West Edfort, there were tough questions to face. At our next big appearance, at the Organic Spas of the Southwest festival in Santa Fe, Jesus told us to schedule a press conference before his speech, and the questions came fast and hard.

Why hadn’t he chosen a running mate yet?

He would introduce her in exactly one hour, at the rally. (This was, I must say, a shock to all of us on his campaign. The word “her” in and of itself made news.)

Was he, himself, really part Hispanic?

Well, as a West Texas boy, there was the distinct possibility that some Mexican
sangre
had gotten mixed in somewhere, and, if so, he was proud of it. He spoke Spanish fluently, had even been nicknamed Hay-Zeus when he played wide receiver for the Nessland, Kansas, Fighting Meadowlarks in high school. Anybody could get ahold of the old yearbook and see that for themselves.

What did he plan to do about what everyone now called the Endless War in South America?

He would end it.

Just like that?

Just like that. He’d bring the young men and women home and station them along the borders of their own country, train them to help with the inspection of inbound shipments to make sure nothing dangerous or illegal slipped into our great nation.

What about the threat of terrorism?

It was a real threat, he said. Anyone who thought that all the human inhabitants of this world were decent, polite, and friendly, was living in a dream. The question facing America now was the same question that had faced humanity since the first violent act had been committed: how to respond? In protecting yourself against evil, did you allow yourself to be turned into an evil society? Allow the national mood to be dominated by fear? By hatred? Allow your natural prejudices to be inflamed? No, he said, we’d been doing it wrong. Unless the terrorists took over a nation-state and controlled its army and its weaponry, the war on terror was, by and large, a police action, police and special forces (I cringed at this, because, some years earlier, that had been John Kerry’s line, and I knew how far it had gotten him), and he would divert half of the vast amount of money now being spent on the war to those areas; the other half would fund his domestic programs, including veterans’ health care.