I was going to read the website where I found this pic and find out why Al Gore was included, then I decided it was more fun not knowing.
May I present to you The Private Journals Of Ben Stone Jr.
My father said, “He who believeth in me believeth in the lord our God.” He also said, “Judge not lest ye be judged” and “He who haveth so much as a mustard seed of faith may move mountains.” He would say these things to the coterie of sycophants and followers who trailed behind him like dust behind Pigpen in the old Peanuts comic strips. An unwashed sandal wearing lot given to far away smiles and aimless swaying. Excruciatingly slow metronomes. So many slow motion dashboard hula girls in formless Earth-tone sacks. They would sit and wait patiently for the next drop of wisdom to fall from my father’s lips. Wait to gather up his words and clutch them to their breast as though they were scrambling after the scatterings of a broken string of pearls. They cherished everything my father said.
Even when he said that his enemies would boil in a soup of their own blood and bile. Or the time he proclaimed that the powers of heaven would strike the children of every employee of the I.R.S. with deformity and retardation if they continued to investigate him.
Oh, I’m sorry, misquote. He said persecute. Not investigate.
If any of my father’s followers were here today I’m certain they would have corrected me immediately, their memories are verbatim. Every word in its precise order and when it was said. Even when he announced that the reason the Dodge Mini-Bus wouldn’t run was because it was possessed by demons conjured up by his enemies in the Masonic conspiracy that controlled the world. Or was it the Jews who were controlling the world at that time? I can’t remember. His disciples would. They could tell you exactly what his response was when the compound mechanic told him that the Dodge just had a bad cylanoid.
It was, “Bullshit, you piece of shit pig-fucker!”
Imagine that recited in unison by about sixty people with moon orbiting grins listing from ten to two in perfect syncopation.
These were my baby-sitters until the age of eight. I would say God bless child services but Dad proclaimed their damnation long ago.
Sarah and I had one of those big relationship/ life/ kids discussions. Those discussions always drag me back. The ones centered around children. It got pretty deep into the details of the whole child rearing concept. Timing, balancing your career against raising a family, the pros and cons of nannies and baby-sitters. We’re years from this yet, but it’s these discussions that allow you to begin to imagine, bring somewhat out of the realm of the abstract, spending your whole life with someone.
I guess.
But it’s a game that sometimes has a weird reverse effect on me. All of a sudden I’m plumbing the depths of my dust covered mental boxes rather than playing the “eventually” game. I try to cover this. At least seem like I’m right there with her. But it’s tough with my father screaming passages from the gospels in my head. Especially when they’re laced with obscenities.
Look at it from her point of view. There we are in the Parkside, our mutual diner of choice and a historical landmark of our relationship. The sun is coming in the big picture window that braces our usual Sunday morning table giving the light orange Formica that glow that is both warm and crisp in the way that only light orange Formica can be. We’ve rolled in here after a session of morning sex that was so good she actually left the house without bothering to tame her mass of black curls. You can always tell when she is satisfied and relaxed when she makes no effort at hair management. And we sit. Nursing our coffees. Sleepy grins and bright new eyes giving away our half-state between what looks to be a promising young day and the warmth of bed. We’re waiting on eggs and bacon, staring out the window, when she gets this suddenly serious expression.
“Y’know, the whole career thing really is important to me, but I also really hate the idea of nannies.”
I know what this is. She doesn’t want to say, “Do you think we would be compatible parents?” She is afraid that question would freak me out. Instead she is couching the thing as a modern feminist conundrum. This is a political discussion. This is not a discussion about our future. She has probably been tooling over her approach to this subject for days. Who can blame her? It’s delicate. And the response it invokes in me illustrates why.
Let’s return to our diner and you can see for yourself.
So, there she sits unraveling the Euclidian knot of what to do with the family she doesn’t have yet. She’s touching the little bump in the bridge of her nose. A little compulsion left over from when she was thirteen and decided it was an enormous deformity and spent months trying to push it into place. Now it’s an endearing nervous habit that comes out when she’s thinking about the big questions. And she talks. Tells me her worries and fears for this imaginary child. And as she talks she says something, some word, some phrase, it happens so subtly that I couldn’t even tell you what it was, but it brings my father’s voice crawling out of the murky parts of my brain.
“Honor thy fucking father! So sayeth the lord, you little shit!”
I had been terrorizing my keepers with some very creative finger painting experiments. It was nothing Jackson Pollack hadn’t done. I was just doing it on people. I was bridging the gap between Pollack and Yves Klien. I was a prodigy.
“If you give me reason to believe that you are in fact the Anti-Christ, son, I personally will stake you through the heart!”
Paranoid megalomania tends to blow everything all out of proportion. Depending on my father’s mood and delusion du jour I was something profoundly different from day to day. I was either the son of the messiah, and therefore the grandson of God and divine heir to the throne of heaven twice removed, or I was an abomination, sent by the forces of Hell to rip down the temple that Dad built. I was never a four-year-old acting out under the pressure of an unstable home environment. Nope.
Human expression of the eternal light of salvation.
Incarnation of the rot and corruption infesting the very heart of divine creation.
Those were the choices.
This is confusing for a kid. Especially when the jury is out anew when you wake up each morning. Every day I awoke to a blank slate. I was told consistently that I was the third most important person in the universe. But was I important because I was the ultimate good or because I was the ultimate evil? Well, hmmm, let’s see. Has Dad had his coffee yet?
So, on the subject of family, child rearing, potential fatherhood, sometimes I find myself distracted. Preoccupied.
She can always tell. She falls quiet. I’ve been staring off. Probably failed to answer a question. Got so deep in to the back waters that I couldn’t hear the present calling. Couldn’t hear reality. So she’s been talking about the biggest decision she will face as a woman in the modern world, as a future mother, as a normal, extraordinary person leading a normal, extraordinary life to someone who’s not even there. She’s always so gracious about these things.
Some part of her must hate me.
