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A week later when Detroit Squint dropped by Adams and Tyndall he found Arthur and Lee on the little lawn beside their house and beerily described his early-afternoon visit to a local nude-dancer bar; he also offered his version of a disagreement he and Lulu were having, of which Lee had heard the night before from Lulu. Lulu showed up a half hour later and Detroit retreated indoors; he could soon be heard typing, and when Arthur went inside, Lulu and Detroit gone their separate ways, he found three double-spaced pages beside his Selectric:
My name is Detroit Squint because I come from Detroit and I squint. I'm short and I'm randy. I'm cynical and not afraid to say so any more than I'm afraid to be so. I don't beat my dog. I don’t even beat my wife, or wouldn't if she were my wife. Lulu asked to borrow my car last night to go to church and I told her no. I hate the church. To me, Jesus is just another con, more profitable and uglier than most. I told Lulu, "Choose, you can go to church and believe that crap, but not have me too. No, you can't use the car. What you call church, I call evil."
She blew her stack. She called me bigoted and pig-headed and started to cry; tears streamed down her face. She's beautiful mad. She has brown eyes and her skin is like Kahlua and milk. It'll be brown come spring, when the sun gets at it. She put her face about two inches from mine and she screamed right in my face, "You're crazy! You're crazy you know!" Talk about crazy!
Me and Lulu are going to have kids some day and I'm already excited about it, but I was brought up in the church and little Christians they won’t be. I know what it is to feel God's eyes on you every second of the time, watching you pick your nose and think whatever it is you are thinking that interests the Old Ess-O-Be. No kid of mine is going to grow up terrified by that all-seeing mind-reading name-spelled-backward son of a bitch.
You know, God created us so we get ideas, they float into my mind just like they float into yours, and then somehow some way it's me and you, not God, who's guilty. To me religion looks like a combination of wish fulfillment--people want to live forever--, and guilt--we suck, we know it, we create God to blame ourselves. So we're guilty, God's good. Okay. But we're good, too, right, once in a while? And God knows we are, He made us, but the holy church says His knowing isn't enough, we have to prove it. How? By licking God's ass, that's how. We're all sinners but the ones who lick God's ass don't go to Hell; they get to keep on licking up in Heaven. I'm not against licking--that bronze eye's rich and tasty--but being forced to do it is degrading. Why does God degrade His people so?
It's a raunchy empty world. It must be for people to turn to the church for a reason to live. Me, I don't need a reason. And when I'm done, okay, I'm done.
But till I'm done, you'll see me at the Raunchhouse where the girls get right down and grind it in your face, as close as Lulu's face was to mine last night, that's how close this one had her stinky beaver to my face this afternoon, so close I could hear her sucking at me, squish squish, what a ****, and her next set, after the two others, really pretty gash each one, the next time this one danced, I put a sawbuck, ten samoleons, between my teeth, and she squatted down and rubbed it in my face and used her squish squish slit to take the money. I can still this very second smell her on my beard, my flavor-saver; as I write each word on Arthur's typewriter I smell her, and I'm putting it on paper now, rubbing my face on the page so you can smell her too. Does it stink like God? Oh, much better, much much better!
Women. It's their green world. They were here first. The men came later in spaceships to fertilize the natives; the sons were spacemen like their fathers, the daughters, like the mothers, Earthlings. That's why women know what's happening, they're at home. We men are strangers. We're lost. We think when we're little we're from Earth too, but grown up we know we don't belong, so we try to find home in a woman; maybe some do. Not me. Sometimes I even feel I have, but pretty soon I come to my senses and know it isn't so. She'll never make me really feel at home because she’ll never really know me.
If I were as crazy as Lulu I’d pray for her to know me, but I'm not. She looks right past me or over me or through me. She sure doesn't see me or she wouldn't try to take my car to worship Jesus, Enslaver of the masses. She wants me to believe lies. She wants me to heed fools. She despises my inquiries into truth. She has no respect for the artist, the poet; me. Well, sorry baby, I'll take the truth, cause all this new-age love talk makes me sick. After all the bombs and the plagues the people aren't going to be different. They'll still be greedy and deluded. You watch, the priests'll grab the power then just like they try to now. They'll tell people what to wear and what to eat and what to do and what to think, and if they catch you at anything different they'll torture you until you confess and then they'll burn you at the stake. Politicians are trouble but priest-politicians are ten times worse. They're just as corrupt and on top of that they've got God on their side. He's always for hire.
I came from the Raunchhouse to Randall's here this afternoon so he could smell my beard.
"Ah D," he said, faking a horrible Irish brogue that sounded like it came out of a language lab through a bad ear and putting his scrawny atrophied right arm around my back, "'n’ it's degenerate ye are."
"At least I wasn't in church," I said.
"I heard you threatened to break up with Lulu over where she goes looking for the truth," he said.
What does he expect to gain from pimping for the church? Healing? You should hear him talk about his healing! Oh brother, he's a genuine cynic. I don't think he believes in anything at all. I don't even think he believes in himself. I love the old man. Today he called himself a nonsectarian healee! Ingratitude? To the max! I've heard him mock every person who's ever laid hands on him or whatever it is they do. And then he talks all this positive bullshit like he's a true believer. He's perfect!
He's a horrible poet! He dedicated a poem to me last week and actually read it aloud to me and Lulu and Lee and Alice. He'd just gotten stoned again or he might have had more sense. I'll spare you the whole poem but you'll get the idea from just the last three lines:
even today on shrunken talisman her tears
it will not grow
it was not green like her
He spoke them solemnly, as though they were a resolution, then looked around, as though appealing to a court, and said: "And Detroit doesn't like it, even after I've told him that the talisman in the last stanza is the chopped-off penis from the third. Can you imagine? Dried and shrunk, and she's watering it so it'll grow again, but it won't. No second chance!"
Personally, I hope he doesn't heal on time. I couldn't take the bullshit. I told him so today and he laughed and seriously told me we'll all just have to take what comes. I love him.
_____
To go to the next part of THE HEALING click here.
To go to the THE HEALING & LOVE NOTE DISCUSSION FORUM click here. I want to hear almost anything you are willing to say, including whether you have had similar or contradictory experiences. Criticism of my behavior and beliefs is also solicited and will be (more or less!) welcome.
Edited by Coach, 09 March 2006 - 09:13 PM.
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