The Seven Deadly Sins (28 page)

The biggest argument against this new list will be the people who drag out the Ten Commandments and call bullshit on me. Well, I have a rebuttal for that. The Ten Commandments are not strong enough for this very reason: “commandment” and “deadly sin” have two different vibes to them. A commandment? Come on, man, nobody even uses that word anymore. Also there are ten of these things, and most of them really never get to the point. What is more, much like the original seven, many of the commandments cancel each other out. The Ten Commandments are tired fucking orders that came from a fairy tale. Jack and Moses and Jill went up the hill. Jack fell down and broke his crown and Moses came carrying two stone tablets with dictation from a burning bush. Give me a break, man. I say take the most volatile bits from the Ten Commandments and let them stand on their own by stepping into the shoes of the Seven Deadly Sins.

By leaving the confines of the language barrier infesting the commandments, you find yourself getting the gist when they are in context: These are the bits of the Ten Commandments that are deadly. These are the bits of the Ten Commandments we are not supposed to do. I know, I know—the way they are written may be fairly poetic. But the language gets in the way of what they are trying to say:
Do not do this shit
. Anyway, think about this: God purportedly gave Moses six hundred commandments but only ten have survived. So let's get the deadly parts into the Seven Deadly Sins before we lose those bits, too—you know, for posterity. The commandments are not strong enough in their conviction. Call them sins and you get people's attention. Call them deadly sins and no one misses the meaning.

As I have said, the time for subtlety is over. If people insist on a list of deadly sins as a reminder of the activities they are not supposed to be engaged in, then let that list blast forth with the sort of clarity you get from violent brass instruments and tympani drums. To me, it should come as common sense: This is the shit you are not supposed to be doing. But if people need a cheat sheet, fine. But let's not beat around the burning bush. Let's just put it out there. This new list does exactly that. Murder is a deadly sin, as is child abuse, rape, torture, stealing, lying, and shitty music. With this straightforward guide, there will be no misconception. I know I might think very highly of myself, especially that I may hold sway on how you readers might view something as cemented as the original Seven Deadly Sins, but I am just a guy who is looking at this from another angle. I am putting forth a sense of currency and a sense of who we are today. The humans I see like to know what the fuck is going on. I cannot help but back that.

We have been taught to live with what we know. We are just minions of the past, hauling baggage we have no idea we are carrying and have no clue where it came from. The duties of living are given to mistakes we never made and hamper our abilities to learn from the mistakes we are going to make. But that is the cycle: We are too busy fixing things behind us while simultaneously missing the things we are breaking in our own path. So I think we should turn around and pay attention to the road. The past is like ornery children in the backseat: You know it is a mess back there, but you have to keep your eyes on the highway. You can curse and throw threats, but nothing is going to change what is behind you—you can only control what you see. That is what I think a new deadly list can do: Give us a modern reminder with a classic tint. By upgrading the Seven Deadly Sins, we are embracing the original list as human inevitability. We are all those things—greedy, gluttonous, angry, vain, envious, lazy, and horny—and more. We are flawed and perfect. We are miracles of commonality. We just need to lift the guilt from our emotions and put it on a set of true sins. Is this perfect? Hardly. Is it credible? Of course it is.

There is going to come a time when we have to accept who we are without the assistance of religion. That will be the dawn of true faith. We leave the big decisions to invisible consultants and pray we get the answers we are looking for. You might as well flip a coin. The late great George Carlin once said he gave up praying to God and started praying to Joe Pesci because his prayers to Joe Pesci were answered with as much accuracy and frequency as those to God. He had a great point. I will not try to outdo his genius, but I will say this: Great minds had the insight to look for answers from the gods. They had the intellect and necessity to coin the Seven Deadly Sins. In this day and age,
we need to look beyond the virginal approach to how we treated our instincts. If we need a list of Seven Deadly Sins, let them say exactly what they need to. If we as people are still looking for answers, we should turn our eyes away from the heavens and look to each other. I know we do not play well together—hell, some of us do not even like being in the same room with each other—but the divine lies in all of us. We are miracles. We are “god.” If we shared a little more, we would not be left feeling less. We hold the keys to our own destinies. It is time we started looking for the locks.

In a hail of glass and poisoned darts, I exploded out of the tenth-story window, spinning like Louganis in midair while clinging to the documents I had just stolen from a secret locker hidden deep within the last place anyone would think to look for information of that nature: the Capitol Records building in Hollywood, California. After a clandestine meeting with members of an ultra-conservative sect of the Moonies, I had stumbled onto the pieces of the puzzle that were about to blow this case wide open. Unfortunately, my escape was nearly thwarted by an elite mercenary team that had been hired by a clandestine adversary known only as the “Shadow Man” to keep me not only from revealing the contents of the documents to an unsuspecting world but also to keep me from evading capture any longer. Having no other choice but to hurl myself through inches of seemingly unbreakable high-rise glass, I let gravity hold me in its icy cold grip for what felt like an eternity before deploying my camouflaged Urban Parachute from underneath my Josh Groban hooded sweatshirt. As I floated down to safety, I could still hear the cursing from hundreds of feet above me, the sounds telling me that I had shot the gap and remained unscathed. I landed, bent my knees to take a little of the impact, cut my chute loose, and cast one long look up to where I had just come from. “One more for America,” I thought to myself silently.

I made my way to my high-end but fairly inexpensive Toyota parked a few blocks away in a zone that had a two-hour window on Sundays and a fifteen-minute opportunity on Labor Day. So I was surprised when I noticed the ticket glaring at me from underneath my windshield wipers. Those sick bastards. . .I plucked it from my automotive sanctum sanctorum and, with a malicious grin, crumpled it into an oblong paper baseball, discarding
it into a stream of water flowing toward one of the city's many sufficient drain openings. For a dangerous second, I allowed myself to watch its journey like a capsized ship on a raging rapid hurtling in the direction of the deadly falls. “One more for America. . .again,” I reminded myself. I also made a mental note to explore other catchphrase possibilities.

My thoughts ran to that fateful meeting on the patio of one of my most trusted compatriots. He had brokered the rendezvous at great risk, as his wife was having friends over for Bridge and Tequila Night. So this tête-à-tête would be sequestered to the backyard and a generous portion of the concrete driveway. If my friend's wife happened to come across us while she roamed the house looking for more margaritas, we were to explain to her that “we were the caterers.” As he snuck back inside to provide subterfuge, I scanned the faces of those assembled before me and, deciding against caution, cut to the quick with a hard-hitting direct question.

“What the fuck, dudes?”

“We can dispense with formalities, sir. We know who you are and we are aware of what you seek.”

“Goody for you fuckers. Say what you came to say.”

“We are not your enemies, sir. We fight the same cause.”

“Fight? Are we going to have a problem now?”

There were ten of them and one of me—hellish odds, even for a man who was a trained master of several direct-to-video styles of martial arts. I squinted against the dying light to show them I meant business. I bore my teeth in a vicious smear of a grimace that hopefully disguised the fact that I had gas. I could not let my occasional irregularity get the best of me—not in a situation of life or death. So I continued to stare at them as if I were reading their minds, which I could if I really wanted to but I did not
feel like it at that moment. That jostled something in them, for they got right to the point.

“That which you are searching for is not far; in fact, it is mere minutes away.”

“Tell me.”

“There is a place dark and forbidden to us, a place that takes a form so vile to our way of life we dare not describe it lest our tongues curl to black and fall from our mouths like old chewing gum.”

“That is a very visual and gross way of putting it.”

“Indeed.”

“I need answers, damn it!” My patience was wearing thin, and as much as I would have loved to hang out and admire their matching handmade velour tracksuits, I had business that night, and that business meant. . .business.

“Wait no further, sir. Come closer, and we will give you the details you need.”

That had been a few hours ago. After tracking down a building that to them resembled “a stack of plastic ass pancakes or records or something,” I had broken in, retrieved the analog files, and was about to press the elevator button when I had stumbled into the Shadow Man's little surprise party. The crack squad were armed with riot guns and scatter shot. I had just enough time to see them thumbing back the safeties when I made a beeline for the nearest window. Now I was on the street and ready to run.

I swung behind the Toyota Celica's wheel and fired it up fast. The Toyota, or Myrtle as I had affectionately christened her last week when I rented it, jumped at the chance for action. I threw her into gear and sped to the only place I knew that was safe, the last place on earth that a gang of merciless killers would
think to look for a rogue fugitive with sensitive materials they were trying to retrieve: the Starbucks on Franklin. But I could not find it on my GPS Points of Interest setting so I was obliged to head for the Rainbow Bar and Grill. Just enough time to tuck myself upstairs and out of sight in the upper bar, but that posed a problem, one of utmost importance—I was getting extremely hungry. If I decided to eat there I would have to go downstairs to the restaurant, as there were no tables suitable for dining in the upper club. And in all my years of frequenting the joint, I would not let a little thing like the threat of assassination stand between me and their world-famous Chicken Caesar salad.

But there would be time to figure out what I was going to order later. I slid my cell phone from my jacket pocket and dialed Gorby's number. Gorby was my tech specialist and I knew I would need his help now more than ever before. Skilled in every form of digital defense known to man, he would help me maneuver through the next few obstacles with a few keystrokes and some savvy pieces of advice. “Come on, man, do me a solid,” I muttered under my breath. After a few rings, he answered. “Hello?”

“Gorby, it's me!”

“What the fuck, dude?”

“No time for that now. Listen, I have the documents.”

Silence. “Uhh. . .what documents?”

“The secret documents I got from the meeting with the Moonies!”

More silence. “What is a Moonie?”

“I have everything I need to bust this case wide open!”

“Dude, are you high or something?”

“Gorby, I do not have time to explain. I need your technical wizardry on this. Do me a favor and go to the computer.”

There was deafening quiet as he performed the task. Seconds felt like prison sentences. “Damn your eyes, man! Hurry!!”