A Graveyard for Lunatics (23 page)

“You!” said Fritz. “Change one scene and you screw up the rest. I showed your last last supper to Manny at noon. Now, because of your goddamn high-quality finale, he says, against his better nature, we got to reshoot some up-front stuff, or the film looks like a dead snake with a live tail. He wouldn’t tell you this himself; he sounded like he was eating his own entrails for lunch, or your tripes en casserole. He called you words I don’t use, but finally said put the bastard to work on scenes nine, fourteen, nineteen, twenty-five, and thirty. Hopscotch rewrites and re-shoots. If we reshoot every other scene, we might fool people into thinking we got one half-ass fine film.”

I felt the old warm color flushing my face.

“That’s a big job for a new writer!” I exclaimed. “The time element!”

“All in the next three days! We’ve held the cast. I’m calling Alcoholics Anonymous to dog J. C. for seventy-two hours now that we know where he hides—”

I stared, quietly, but could not tell them I had scared J. C. off the lot.

“Seems I’m responsible for a lot of bad this week,” I finally said.

“Sisyphus, stay!” Fritz leaned to clap his hands on my shoulders. “Till I get you a bigger rock to push up the goddamn hill. You’re not Jewish; don’t
try
for guilt.” He thrust pages at me. “Write, rewrite. Re-rewrite!”

“You sure Manny wants me on this?”

“He’d rather tie you between two horses and fire off a gun, but that’s life. Hate a little. Then hate a lot.”

“What about
The Dead Ride Fast
? He wants me back on that!”

“Since when?” Fritz was on his feet.

“Since half an hour ago.”

“But he can’t do that without—”

“Right. Roy. And Roy’s gone. And I’m supposed to find him. And the studio is being shut for forty-eight hours to rebuild, repaint what doesn’t need repainting.”

“Jerks. Dumb asses. Nobody tells me anything. Well, we don’t need the stupid studio. We can rewrite Jesus from my house.”

The phone rang. Fritz all but strangled it in his fist, then shoved it at me.

It was a call from Aimee Semple McPherson’s Angelus Temple.

“I beg your pardon, sir,” said a barely restrained woman’s voice. “But do you happen to know a man who calls himself J. C.?”

“J. C.?”

Fritz grabbed the phone. I grabbed it back. We shared the earpiece:

“Claims to be the Ghost of Christ reborn and newly repentant—”

“Let me have that!” cried another voice, a man’s. “Reverend Kempo here! You know this dreadful anti-Christ? We would have called the police but if the papers found that Jesus had been thrown out of our church, well! You have thirty minutes to come save this miscreant from God’s wrath!
And mine
!”

I let the phone drop.

“Christ,” I moaned to Fritz, “is resurrected.”

My taxi drove up in front of the Angelus Temple just as the last stragglers from a few late Bible classes were leaving through a multitude of doors.

Reverend Kempo was out front, wringing his rusty hands and walking as if a stick of dynamite was up his backside.

“Thank God!” he cried, rushing forward. He stopped, suddenly fearful. “You
are
the young friend of that creature in there, yes?”

“J. C.?”

“J. C.! What a criminal abomination!
Yes, J. C.!
”

“I’m his friend.”

“What a pity. Quickly, now!”

And he elbow-carried me in and down the aisle of the main auditorium. It was deserted. From on high came the soft sound of feathers, a flight of angel wings. Someone was testing the sound system with various heavenly murmurs.

“Where is—?” I stopped.

For there, center stage, on the bright twenty-four-karat throne of God, sat J. C.

He sat rigidly, eyes looking straight out through the walls of the church, his hands placed, palms up, on either armrest.

“J. C.” I trotted down the aisle and stopped again.

For there was fresh blood dripping from each of the cicatrices on his exposed wrists.

“Isn’t he awful? That terrible man! Out!” cried the Reverend behind me.

“Is this a Christian church?” I said.

“How
dare
you ask!”

“Don’t you think, at a moment like this,” I wondered, “that Christ himself might show mercy?”

“Mercy!?” cried the Reverend. “He broke into our service, yelling, ‘I am the true Christ! I fear for my life. Gangway!’ He ran to the stage to display his wounds. He might as well have
exposed
himself.
Forgive
? There was shock and almost a riot. Our congregation may never come back. If they tell, if the newspapers call, you see? He has made us a laughing stock. Your friend!”

“My friend—” but my voice lacked luster as I climbed up to stand by the ham Shakespearean actor.

“J. C.,” I called, as across an abyss.

J. C.’s eyes, fixed on eternity, blinked, refocused.

“Oh, hello, junior,” he said. “What’s going on?”

“Going on?!” I cried. “You’ve just made yourself one helluva mess!”

“Oh, no, no!” J. C. suddenly saw where he was and held up his hands. He stared as if someone had tossed him twin tarantulas. “Did they scourge me again? Did they follow? I’m dead. Protect me! Did you bring a bottle?”

I patted my pockets as if I carried such items all the time and shook my head. I turned to glance at the Reverend, who with a burst of invective scuttled behind the throne and shoved some red wine at me.

J. C. lunged, but I grabbed and held it as lure.

“This way. Then the cork comes out.”

“You would
dare
talk to Christ like that!”

“You would dare to be Christ!?” cried the Reverend.

J. C. reared back. “I do not dare, sir. I
am
.”

He arose with a jaunty attempt at hauteur, and fell down the steps.

The Reverend groaned, as if murder moved his heart to move his fists.

I got J. C. up and, waving the bottle, led him safely up the aisle and out.

The cab was still there. Before getting in, J. C. turned to see the Reverend in the doorway, his face blazing with hatred.

J. C. held up both crimson paws.

“Sanctuary! Yes?
Sanctuary
?”

“Hell, sir,” shouted the Reverend, “would not have you!”

Slam!

Inside the temple I imagined a thousand angel wings, knocked free, sifting down the now unholy air.

J. C. stumbled into the cab, grabbed the wine, then leaned forward to whisper to the cab driver.

“Gethsemane!”

We drove away. The driver glanced at his map book with one eye.

“Gethsemane,” he muttered. “Is that street? avenue? or
place
?”

“Even the cross isn’t safe, even the cross isn’t safe, anymore,” mumbled J. C. crossing town, his eyes fixed to his wounded wrists as if he couldn’t believe they were attached to his arms. “What’s the world coming to?” J. C. peered out the cab window at the flowing houses.

“Was Christ manic-depressive? Like me?”

“No,” I said lamely, “not nuts. But you’re in the bowl with the almonds and the cashews. What made you go there?”

“I was being chased. They’re after me. I am the Light of the World.” But he said this last with heavy irony. “Christ, I wish I didn’t know so much.”

“Tell me. Fess up.”

“Then they’d chase
you
, too! Clarence,” he murmured. “He didn’t run fast enough, either, did he?”

“I knew Clarence, too,” I said. “Years ago…”

That scared J. C. even more. “Don’t tell anyone! They won’t hear it from me.”

J. C. drank half the wine bottle at a chug, then winked and said, “Mum’s the word.”

“No, sir, J. C.! You got to tell me, just in case—”

“—I don’t live beyond tonight? I
won’tl
But I don’t want both of us dead. You’re a sweet jerkoff. Come unto me, little children, and, by God,
you
show up!”

He drank and wiped the smile off his face.

We stopped along the way. J. C. fought to leap out to buy gin. I threatened to hit him and bought it myself.

The taxi sailed into the studio and slowed near my grandparents’ house.

“Why,” said J. C., “that looks like the Central Avenue Negro Baptist Church! I can’t go in there! I’m not black or Baptist. Just Christ, and a Jew! Tell him where to go!”

The taxi stopped at Calvary at sunset. J. C. looked up at his old familiar roost. “Is that the
true
cross?” He shrugged. “Just about as much as I’m the true Jesus.”

I stared at the cross. “You can’t hide there, J. C. Everyone knows that’s where you go, now. We got to find a really secret place for you to stay in case there’s a call for retakes.”

“You don’t understand,” said J. C. “Heaven is shut and so is Hell. They’d find me in a rathole or up a hippo’s behind. Calvary, plus wine, is the only place. Now, get your foot off my toga.”

He put the rest of the wine down his cackle, then moved out and up the hill.

“Thank God, I’ve finished all my major scenes,” said J. C. “It’s all over, son.” J. C. took my hands in his. He was immensely calm now, having veered from the heights to the depths and now steadied somewhere between. “I shouldn’t have run away. And you shouldn’t be seen here talking to me. They’ll bring extra hammers and nails and you’ll play the second extra thief on my left. Or Judas. They’ll bring a rope and suddenly you’re Iscariot.”

He turned and put his hands on the cross and one foot on the little climbing peg on one side.

“One last thing?” I said. “
Do
you know the Beast?”

“God, I was there the night he was
born
!”

“Born?”

“Born, dammit, what did it sound like?”

“Explain, J. C., I got to know!”

“And die for knowing, you sap,” said J. C. “Why do you want to die?
Jesus
saves, yes? But if I’m Jesus and I’m lost, you’re all lost! Look at Clarence, the poor bastard. The guys that got him are running scared. And, scared, they panic and when they panic they hate. You know anything about
real
hatred, junior? This is it, no amateur nights, no time off for good behavior. Someone says kill and it’s kill. And you wander around with your stupid naive notions about people. God, you wouldn’t know a real whore if she bit you or a real killer if he knifed you. You’d die, and dying, say: oh,
that’s
what it’s like, but it’s too late. So listen to old Jesus, fool.”

“A convenient fool, a useful idiot. That’s what Lenin said.”

“Lenin!? You see! At a time like this, when I’m screaming: There’s Niagara Falls! where’s your barrel!? you jump off the cliff with no parachute. Lenin!? gah! Which way to the madhouse?”

J. C. trembled as he finished the wine.

“Useful,” he swallowed, “idiot.”

“Now, listen,” he said, for it was hitting him now. “I won’t tell you again. If you stay with me, you’re squashed. If you knew what I knew, they’d bury you in ten different graves across the wall. Cut you up in neat sections, one to a plot. If your mom and dad were alive, they’d burn them. And your wife—”

I grabbed my elbows. J. C. pulled back.

“Sorry. But you are vulnerable. God, I’m still sober. I said ‘nulverable.’ Your wife is back when?”

“Soon.”

And it was like a funeral gong sounding at high noon.

Soon.

“Then hear the last book of Job. It’s over. They won’t stop until they kill everyone. Things got out of hand this week. That body on the wall you saw. It was put there to—”

“Blackmail the studio?” I quoted Crumley. “They afraid of Arbuthnot, this late in time?”

“Scared gutless! Sometimes dead folks in graves have more power than live folks above. Look at Napoleon, dead a hundred and fifty years, still alive in two hundred books! Streets and babies named for him! Lost everything, gained in losing! Hitler? Will be around ten thousand years. Mussolini? Will be hanging upside down in that gas station the rest of our lives! Even Jesus.” He studied his stigmata. “I haven’t done bad. But now I got to die again. But I’ll be screwed six ways from Sunday if I take a sweet sap like you along. Now, shut up. Is there another bottle?”

I displayed the gin.

He grabbed it. “Now help me up on my cross and get the hell out!”

“I can’t leave you here, J. C.”

“There’s nowhere else to
leave
me.”

He drank most of the pint.

“That’ll kill you!” I protested.

“It’s painkiller, kid. When they come to get me, I won’t even be here.”

J. C. began to climb.

I clawed at the worn wood of the cross, then hit it with my fists, my face pointed up.

“Dammit, J. C. Hell! If this
is
your last night on earth—are you
clean
!”

He slowed in his climb. “What?”

It exploded from my mouth: “When did you last confess!? When,
when
?”

His head jerked from south to north so his face was toward the cemetery wall and beyond.

I surprised myself: “Where?
Where
did you confess?”

His face was fixed rigidly, hypnotically, to the north, which made me leap to scramble up, seizing the climb pegs, groping with my feet.

“What are you
doing
?” J. C. shouted. “This is
my
place!”

“Not anymore, there, there, and
here
!”

I swung around behind him so he had to turn to yell: “Get down!”

“
Where
did you confess, J. C.?”

He was staring at me but his eyes slid north. I swiveled my gaze to fix it along the great stretch of crossbar where an arm and a wrist and a hand could be spiked.

“God, yes!” I said.

For, lined up as in a rifle’s sight was the wall, and the place on the wall where the wax and papier-mache dummy had been hoisted in place, and, further on across a stone meadow, the facade and the waiting doors of St. Sebastian’s church!

“Yes!” I gasped. “Thanks, J. C.”

“Get down!”

“I am.” And I took my eyes away from the wall but not before I saw his face turn once again to the country of the dead and the church beyond.

I descended.

“Where you going!?” said J. C.