Ch. 1

                                         

Book 1 of the series ‘Diary of an imaginary man’ or,’ who I almost was’: “A complicated birth”

 “I feel like Black Jesus got his hands on me and guides me through life to put me where I'm supposed to be.” – Tupac Shakur

                                                                 “A COMPLICATED BIRTH”
                             
                                                             We lay on the chapel carpet
                                                                Seraphs listened sweetly
                                                                As we collapse as a tar pit
                                                          And herald emerald hearts sent
                                                                   To repent discreetly

                                                  The sky splashed through stained glass
                                               The Shepherd and his lamb watch shy eyed
                                                  As we begin breathing heavy and fast
                                                   Naked skin dressed with Joseph’s coat
                                                               Of falling fractured light

                                                                           The air’s thick…
                                                                        Electric flute winds
                                                                        We wade through
                                                                           A proven myth
                                                                    as Orgasms electrocute

                                                    (Two are One, Three are One, Five are One)

Pt. 1
“Jesus must be black” [Awakening]

It began as a conversation, ‘there’s no way to grow without pain’ he said, and she replied ‘there’s no superman that hasn’t bled. Every prophet  loses his head at the root of a prostitute.’

It continued in the chapel, where vibrations got me high and the wooden cross that hung over the pulpit began to sound like an emerald. The empty pews appreciated music on that day more than I had ever seen them on the Sabbath. A dove encircled in blue harmonized with the light and left me hypnotized. The sky, through the window, was purple and the clouds were pink. The sky, I thought, Must be His kiss- And He kissed my eyes again.

Circa 1960 she said “God accept all my sufferings, my tiredness, my humiliation, my tears, my nostalgia, my being hungry, my suffering of cold, all the bitterness accumulated in my soul… Dear Lord, have pity on those, with the guns, who persecute and torture us day and night. Grant them, too, the divine grace of knowing the sweetness and happiness of Your love” before her Comrades poured her innards out on the frost bitten pavement. She remains nameless.

I sat in a coffee shop, he told me of his manifesto and we dialogued on the misunderstanding of Marx and of Darwin; Marx was a prophet I said, not a revolutionary, or a socialist, He agreed and said Darwin was a religious man, and didn’t believe his own ideas, but only published them because they were his, I wasn’t sure; He had lived on the streets since the sixties. He didn’t shy from telling how he raped a few women, he said he wouldn’t do that these days though, it was too likely that one would get caught. It was easy to see how this was justified… the strongest survive. This didn’t bother me as much as I might think. My old roommate confessed to me that he used to molest people in their sleep. Jesus loves them both. The least I could do is not be disgusted and by His Grace, I wasn’t. He asked me if I could spare some money, he needed some brown (I noted how earlier he told me he stuck to green and I told him that until two years ago I used to smoke) I told him I appreciated his honesty, but only had the card I got us coffee with. He thanked me for the coffee, it was the coldest it had been in Austin in a long time, and school was canceled. He was a genius, he could’ve changed the world, solved the Middle Eastern crisis and the global food shortage, not to mention the world’s American economy, and he’s homeless and willing to turn a trick for smack. He reads, more than I do, and writes far more too. In fact, he’s rented over 5,000 books, and read them all, before returning them to libraries in different cities, It humbled me to be preached to by him, about the fearfulness of people, “if you’ve got something to say, you might as well shout it” he shouted (as he had been for the whole conversation) I’m ashamed to say I was embarrassed.

A year ago I watched them in religious rapture. They spoke as some angels do, like a jazz pianist hiccupping turrets on crack, but holy. I could tell they thought they could tell I was uncomfortable. “Who would I give my award for ‘best of show?’ the man on the floor, or the women who prophesied over him? The man in the front, who said their money would buy them … miracles and maybe more money” Yes, surely this was what I thought, as I stood there. I was reminded of my old Gestalt group leader, who as an expert in the inception of minds under the influence of emotional ecstasy, as well as Gestalt and Reichien methods. He thought he was the one to start me down a mystic path… Or at least that he would be the one to lead me through it… Or at least it seemed he hoped he would be. He taught me how to get high by breathing and then convinced me I hated my parents. He also over dosed on brown, he injected though. All of the sudden I was back in that Hindu place in Singapore. The gestalt man told me to remain present, there, with him, I saw visions of the golden idol, she had many arms, and a blade in each, they howled at my face, BE HERE, BE PRESENT, BE IN THE NOW! But I couldn’t, not when her arms danced before my eyes, I was going down the disposal, I was being grinded by the blades, I was on Salvia Divinorum, though I hadn’t partaken of it. Teeth chewed on mangled flesh and bones. Eyes. Teeth and eyes. More teeth. No tongues. Only teeth. Gnawing. Consuming. Devouring, bones. Wailing in the language of some angels. Tongue less angels.  The eyes were blind. They inhaled the stench of rotting flesh. The teeth, the teeth. The eyes. The raw, deformed human matter I swam in. The sulfuric smell of his breath, in my face. Full of rage. And endless network of flesh consumption, a physical narration of the state of the nations. This meat packing machine, with the meat, eating the meat, bones and all, with black hole mouths, would it devour it’s self out? Completely? Was there hope for a new order? Can man follow another path? Can blind eyes see? The Hindu woman idol was back, with her arms, and exposed golden breasts, her crown. She spit me out, And now I was here again… Surrounded by the ecstasy, the strobe lights, the people drunk and high on the holy spirit. All listening to the man, with the microphone, who taught them to get high by breathing, and chanting, and meditating, He reminded me of Gestalt. I wondered if he would over dose on the holy spirit… I gave the blue ribbon to him. I pinned it to his chest. He bled out on the pulpit. Every one said amen. I stood up, slid down the aisle I had been sitting on. A jumping lady hit me with her elbow. I didn’t hold it against her, how could I? She didn’t know what she was doing or where she was. Did I? Back walking along on the street I wondered… “On the day of Pentecost was Jesus a word wielded like a lever?”  But then again, why do I judge these people so harshly? And judge drug addicts and prostitutes and drug dealers and sexual miscreants and suicide bombers and violent pacifists and the blind guy who wasn’t really blind that I walked home who pulled a blade and took all I had on me that day and the guys with suits and ties who ride the bikes and try to convert me at my door step and president Bush and president Obama not at all? Not even Kim Jung Ill or Adminijab, not even Lady Gaga or Lil Wayne, not even R Kelly or Chris Brown, not even Martha Stewart or Ron Imus, nor Tiger Woods nor Ben Rothlisberger nor Kobe Bryant, but I do judge the racists in Nacogdoches and the racists up north who think we’re all racists who’re from east Texas...  Sociology and anthropology maybe… Or maybe pride? Or maybe I’m just another hypocrite like the rest… yes I know that much is true, I am a hypocrite. 

Tsehay Tolessa taught me the Truth. She said “They forced my hands under my knees and tied them there. They put a stick through these ropes and hung me upside down. They filled my mouth with dirty rags. I almost suffocated. They beat me, breaking my bones. Great pieces of skin hung from my body.  Then they freed me from my bonds and forced me to run with bleeding feet over a path with sharp stones. Next, they put me in a small cell containing 62 people. There was only room to stand. Stand on what? On bleeding feet,  on broken bones. The cell was completely dark and there was no air. Don’t ask how prisoners fulfilled their bodily needs. There was one hole serving as a toilet, but no one could get to it.” Tsehay could not even hold a cup, so others had to help her drink, She stayed in that cell for over a year, As a result of spending such a long time in darkness, she has not regained full vision, Tsehay Tolessa was tortured for her faith in Jesus Christ by Ethiopian Communists, She said that while they took pleasure in branding, breaking and slicing her skin they would ask her “where is your Jesus now?” She said she only took pity on her torturers, For they were more blind than they had made her, She said she knew the Lord was always with her, alive in her heart, “Jesus was there, in the midst of human waste, in the humiliation, in the blood and stench. He is more than a King ruling in heaven, a bridegroom. He is the one tortured in prison.” Were the last words I heard her say, And it made me think of Isaiah 63:9 which says “In all their affliction He was afflicted.”

I was back at TCs longue, after I listening to Tsehay, again. You might think I reminisced with guilt, but I didn’t feel any such thing. I didn’t go inside TCs much. I lack the confidence to dance and you could hear the blues music outside just as well. I was usually Smoking weed and dust with the doorman. On our way to TC’s my friend confessed that he was afraid of going east of Chicon street, I took pride in loving it there. His apprehension made me feel braver. The door man, Wigpen, as he told me to call him, called me kinfolk, I took pride in that as well. The truth was I loved my friends there, and I loved being known by name there. Every week, Kinfolk would bring his friends, all of us minors, all of us white, and get shitfaced and high. “T”, one of Wigpen’s employees would offer “massage for donations” to the outdoor patrons. I was her promotional assistant; I would always echo “she’s got those Asian ladies in the mall beat, easy”. I never got off the back of Wigpen’s truck bed except to get booze from inside or return booze inside, because he would provide the weed as long as I kept rolling the Js and blunts for us. He said I had a gift for rolling. Sometimes 6’9, who was the bouncer for that place, would take a few girls around back to one of those giant blue crates people move stuff in, or some construction places use as temporary office space, and make pornos. 6’9 would always joke with me, saying he could make me a star, I told him I’d need a script first so I could run it past my agent. The idea of having sex in its self terrifies me; add in a video camera, professional actresses, and the prospect of the film being posted on the internet. I misspoke earlier when I said I didn’t feel guilt, I feel guilty about the pride I felt about loving that place like I did, I wish I had loved the people more, and the idea of my being in that place less. One of my friends, who sold the medicines, sass, pills, syrups, smack, white chicks, cures for whatever ails ya… he called himself Black Jesus.

Slavery just got cleverer, it never left America. Media and ‘economy’ are the new whips and the upper class are the new drivers. The funny thing is, slavery is now our biggest export. Fucking genius. Pure evil. But maybe Black Jesus held the key to overcoming this new Roman Empire in a similar way brown Jesus did, suicide. It seems to defeat the slave drivers of this world, the slaves have to embrace the only power left to us, fearlessness, having everything to live for and thus everything to die for. How can you defeat an army of martyrs? Not terrorists, mind you, but martyrs, Jesus’s, Ghandis, MLKs…

I came back to the room with Tsehay, I wondered how He was afflicted when I was at TCs I wondered what He thought of me. I didn’t feel dirty, (I usually feel dirty all the time) I mostly just felt like I wanted to visit with Wigpen again. He always had good insights on anthropology and sociology. He told me of the differences between me and him and that our focus should be on our common ground, “skins just sand” he would say, It stuck with me. I always gave baby girl a kiss at the 2^nd door, because she always gave me a stamp instead of a sharpie X.  For some reason that made me think of Judas, and I didn’t like that. I wish I could be Tsehay’s friend… But she didn’t even know my name.

Now I’m back in Afrika with the kids, in the slums, with their ribs like xylophones. Those guilt trip commercials didn’t seem to make it here. How did I? Why had I been chosen to see so much, to experience Kenya? Why did this place feel like real church? Jesus’ church? Why did their smiles radiate brighter than any of our false toothed, rich Hollywood idols? Why were they so joyful? Why was it so sincere? Few in America seem joyful…not sincerely anyway… and why did they want to tell me about Jesus? Why didn’t they ask for food, or money? They came to the rich white person, telling me about a gift they wanted me to receive because I was in need. Some of their faces covered in flies. They too were homeless, and I also met them on the steps of a church. Why didn’t they have the angry ideas that we have, about a cruel God who allows humanity to suffer? Where people really suffer? Everyone in America asks for money (from street walkers to pastors) … There were so many flies that the local people didn’t even bother swatting them away, not even from the babies the sometimes bare-chested mothers would carry, I swatted at the flies at first, but took pride in my attempts to not. As time passed, George, my family’s friend, who showed us around the slums, said he had grown up in that part of town, He opened up his home to us; He said Jesus gave him a job driving around rich people like us (not his exactly words). He called us his friends though, and we called each other family. This is a giant family after all. I was proud of myself for not realizing me, my two sisters and my mom and my dad were the only white people I had seen in however many months, pride in realizing something I hadn’t till then realized… Damn my fucking pride. It’s the worst of me, sometimes it’s my identity: Self-righteous bullshit, reverse racism, thinking my experiences somehow separated me from my peers. I was reminded, there in the alleyway, in a town in Kenya that didn’t even have a name, of Isaiah 64:6, “Our righteous deeds appear as filthy rags before God”. That made me feel better until I thought of whatever stained rag I had hidden under my bed at home, next to a DVDs or two. Then I realized, some day, I would get to live in George’s mansion in Heaven and make food with him. That would be perfect… I took pride in thinking that way because I’m an ass hole, I’m a piece of shit in a pile of dollar bill diamonds, George, and all of our friends, were diamonds in the British Empire’s shit pile. Imperialism. Expansionism. Exploitationism. Now I wonder if I should even write this, or destroy it like the rest of my honesty, Truth. Damn. The truth. What would Jesus do? Yeah, he’d tell the truth, so I press the floppy disk icon in order to save this. That’s the Holy Spirit, the Truth, telling the Truth, those moments when a liar like me tells the Truth, that’s the work of the Holy Spirit, not that tab that fills the offering plate. The Holy Spirit is in the smile of an Afrikan child who may or may not die of Malaria, if they survive starvation long enough, and dodge enough bullets along the way. Yet somehow… they’re joyful, more joyful than anyone I’ve met in the U.S… “Time is like the ebbing tide on the beach” I read, somewhere, which to me makes technology like a documentary of a whore house, preserving images of the human condition... Somewhere on that spider web internet there are videos of my friend 6’9 and his girls and some guy like myself is out there producing rags of righteousness to it… And if that’s true, I must be some sort of pimp, or rather, prostitute, a prostitute who prays: I have a place, hidden deep in the woods. No one can see it except God. An ashen tree stands beside it. And a great oak towers over it, protecting it from the elements and A honey suckle climbs the door post, and a blue bird nests on the roof, in the gutter and sings for me daily. My home is surrounded by apple trees, who give me tender fruit. And behind my house runs a crystal spring, who gives the purest water and beside it, water crests sprout in abundance. God has sent hens to lay manna for me and a sweet cow to give me milk and bees producing honey and the bushes around my house yield succulent berries and all around me the most beautiful music plays:  the song of the birds, and the lowing of cattle, and the leaves dancing in the wind, and the cascade of the river. No king could hire such music with silver or gold, it is the music of Jesus Christ himself, freely given. Yes this is where George’s family and I will live, and yet live still. This is where I have the joy of picking berries for him to eat and making wine for us to drink. And he will sing for me, in French, Swahili, Yoruba or some other tongue too beautiful for me to understand. “wa wa wa emimi mo, wa wa wa alagba ra, wa o wa o wa o. ha le lu jah, ha le lu jah. Le me ke za mulu ngu, m’ma lo a ke o ye ra. M’ma lo a ke o ye ra.” Lemekeza mulungu!!! We shall shout together, in the language of some angels. But I will understand every word and then we’ll build a fire.

Then we got back into his tour car, and he drove us through the town, speeding through every red light because there were militant gangs there too, who tormented with guns and knives. And my family’s skin smelled like money, money with which to buy more guns, and shoot more of George’s kinfolk. Yes, I think money mostly buys guns, literal or figurative. That’s probably why Jesus told his followers to take no extra money and not even extra clothes, that’s some intense shit, too. I wonder what would happen if I did that? Were the disciples ancient hobos? What would we have done to them, shoeless, homeless, and trying tell us they had a gift to give us? Preaching to us about God?

     I sit with my friend Derek; we’re trying to study for class on the fourth floor of the Union. We trade psilibicin vacation stories, his were colorful, mine filled a notebook in 5 hours and convinced me I had aged a hundred years in one day. Making me four hundred years old or so. He couldn’t help but bring up his cynicism toward American politics, THE NEW WORLD ORDER, and the modern church. I think the last part was because of the bible verses written on the back on my hand and the WWJD bracelet I keep on my wrist, always. He says there’s just too much bullshit in this world and too much that makes him fully aware that there’s no explanation other than there being a God. But then how can this God allow for drugs, rape, torture, murder, warfare. I had no explanation, I still don’t. All I could think of was a part of AFALMA’s (Afrikan Association For Liturgy, Music and Arts) report in 1991 which says “We believe in God, who conceived our existence and from whom Africa earned its identity. The powers of darkness have disturbed it but nobody could eradicate it. We are in the process of going back through the stories in order to fully recapture our identity. It is not necessary to trace back exactly the origin of Afrikan religion but it is important to stress that our religious experience is part of our everyday life. We want to fully worship God with an African identity. We are what we are because God is who He is.” Particularly the part about recapturing identity, I think this applies to all people. We’re all trying to recapture this distant identity. Some good version of ourselves we know we used to be and really should be. Derek told me that they’ve proven that Jesus was actually black. I think he must be right. Jesus is black and beautiful, as beautiful as George, and Tsehay and that Russian Lady… because they are who they are, and they are who we were, because Jesus is who He is.

So it ends with this: there’s something about Jesus that transfixes me, obsessively… Something different. Something powerful. Something unique. Something strange enough to be Truth. At this point people usually point out that if God were so loving, He would  stop all this of the suffering going on in this world. But it seems to me that if God Himself is going to take on human form and suffer the way He did, and be so near to those of us suffering right now, who are we to say we deserve more than God? To say it’s unfair for us to suffer and die, when He suffered and died for us solely because we rejected Him? Jesus is with all people who suffer. As long as we suffer, He suffers. And I love Him for that.
Yes Jesus must be black. They say the garden of Eden was in Afrika, and might still be, somewhere in the unknown jungle. I think we are, in some way, through progression, trying to return there, evolve into what we evolved from, even if we don’t acknowledge evolution, or original creation, our entropy laden progrevolution continues onward, and forward back to the future long forgotten and long left behind. According to what I’ve seen, Jesus, the man from Afrika, the paradox unifier, the living dead man, the the killer who gives life, the servant king,  the man who took all the sin on him and yet is holy, the joyful sufferer, the conquering pacifist, the new old man, is carrying us forward to home. 

Alluring refrain
breathes Grace
(in)
The passionate
often suffer from
a symphony
(that)
seems heaven Esq.
to me

He plays jazz music that reminds me of Night Hawks
every evening on an old low fi record player
in the room down the hall.

“in that (place) the notes aren’t
touching” “like their hands”
“(we) sound like coffee and
cigarette smoke” “drizzled (are) the streets”

“Ta dat, dada”
the brass chokes on a red ball
down the hall
down the hall
he’s playing a lament for fall.
                    ~static~
“My girl, my girl, don’t lie to me
tell me, where did you sleep last night?”
“(home.)“