I am a minister of comfort by trade, and I have for some years helped those afflicted with various defects of the soul.  In the past I’ve relied for my joie de vivre on the restorative properties of my peculiar ministry.

But since the inner death of my love, I’ve lost what constituted the animating force in my world, the electric spark. People in my world now seem mere objects.

I watch the crack addicts beside themselves with the jitters, darting their eyes as they make their empty, grandiose gestures, and I feel nothing, no compassion. I walk past the homeless perched like pigeons in the granite vestibules of banks and savings and loans, and I’m impatient with their sloth. I see the prostitutes exiting from the cars of sad, lonely men, bearing the knife wounds inflicted on them in the course of their dangerous trade, and I only want to go home and sleep — [pause] — with one of them, I’m sad to say.

You see, I can’t do anything for them any more. I would save them if I could, but I have no power.

[Suddenly, a voice appears]
Satan:  You are a self-righteous shit, aren’t you, reverend?

Quick:  Who’s there?

Satan:  Take one guess, pal.

Quick:  Obviously this is a joke.

Satan: This is not a joke, Quick.

Quick:  Well, you can’t be Him.

Satan: Why can’t I be “Him”?

Quick: Because God doesn’t introduce himself to those he created in his own image by calling them “shits” and “pal.” That would be Satan’s ploy – to be insulting, then gregarious and overfamiliar.

Satan:  OK, then call me Satan or God or Father or Beelzebub, or whatever you like.

Quick: (to audience) It’s a recording or a public address system of some sort.

Satan:  Just what kind of a minister are you?

Quick:  You should know. You “see all.”

Satan:  You call yourself a minister of comfort. You have a tiny storefront church downtown and run a mail correspondence course in miracles, which provides your income. You work with the homeless, with drug addicts and with prostitutes, one of whom gave you the best blow job of your life on the night before last in a pitch black alleyway behind the Hotel Miramar on 5th and Main. She was a beauty with a hideous tattoo. You were fully clothed.

Quick:  You see all.

Satan:  Now listen to me, you little fuck:  For somebody whose stock-in-trade is saving the souls of others, you sure talk a lot about yourself. Put yourself in that hooker’s shoes. She’s gotta make a buck like anybody else. But you lecture her about quitting. Why don’t you quit your correspondence course?

Quick:  Satan?

Satan:  Bottom line is this — and I’m going to be brutally frank:
You couldn’t find somebody’s soul if they put Christmas lights around it. People are a mystery to you. Can’t you feel them? People do the things they do because it’s a necessity.

Quick:  Sin is not a necessity.

Satan:  Sin is an exterior state.  On the outside it looks like they’re sinning, taking drugs, robbing liquor stores, giving 4-dollar blow jobs. On the inside they’re children, taking care of necessities, taking as much joy in their lives as they possibly can, given the conditions placed upon them by your society. That’s holiness. Can you say the same thing about yourself?

Quick:  Well, I haven’t taken joy in anything lately, but I’m not sure what any of this is leading to....

Satan:  To know what’s holy, one must know unholiness.

Quick:  I know what sin is.

Satan:  You’ve only been toying with sin. You can’t look into a sinner’s heart from a pulpit. I’ll give you the power to look all the way in, through the soul to their deepest secret.

Quick: Then I can save them!

Satan:  [devlish] Precisely. You ready?

Quick:  Yes!

Satan:  Put your ear to the speaker, man. [Quick does it.] Repeat after me: 
“I am a holy sinner
With the power to heal the sick
Somnia credentur vix; non tamen omnia falsa
With a look I can cut to the quick.

Quick:  Where are you? Are you still with me?  [to audience] I feel as if I could see into your souls, as if I could fly around this world on a whim and a prayer.

******************

[Back to narrative]
And that is exactly what I did, with a hope in my heart of finding love again and a renewed ministry, thanks to the power that now pulsed within me.

•••••••••••••••••

The heat from the dessert floor wanted to engulf us all as my eyes made their way through the crowd, until at last they became affixed upon her ripened navel, undulating to and fro, heaving shamelessly to the strains of the maniacal cacophony. 

I made my way through the ecstatic crowd, struggling past spectators to fight for a place in front of her, where I sought to gain my own unadulterated perspective on this piece of embodied magnificence.

I became engaged in the task of tracing the paths of sweat beads as they trickled down her dark brown skin, conforming to every delectable curve of her tainted flesh, from above her shapely waist to below her skimpy, sequined loin cloth. Her mascara-smeared eyelids violently fluttered against the dark backdrop of her pupils, resting momentarily as they rolled back into her head, exposing only the whites of her eyes.

Firmly entrenched in the confines of her vaporous aura, I was able to muster the awful truth she had sought to conceal from the rest of the world and shuddered as the realization clawed its way up from the gnarled and tarnished recesses of her soul.

She peered down at me, having sensed an urgency.

“You’ve killed a man.”

Resenting my accusation, she immediately summoned two large, hulking figures to head toward me in her defense. I responded and fled, my powers thoroughly vindicated.

I wandered into a museum on a side street. There was a door to a dank basement. Behind a shut metal door was a room equipped with shelves upon which sat specimen jars of various animals and, perhaps, fetuses. In my head I heard singing...as the faces might have lapsed into song:

Freaks we are, freaks we are
In glass jars on the shelf
Yet most freakish of them all
May be none other than y’self

We relish our existence
As hideous as it may be
For in our deformed depravity
We’ve found new ways to see

Impish and grotesque
Peering through to look at you
Horrifically repulsive
Nature was not kind, it’s true!

I ran from the room—mounting the stairs with great haste—and retreated from the museum through a back door, finding myself once again on the street.

•••••••

Then, through the smoke-filled haze I caught a glimpse of her, obscured by shadows, suggestively treading those cool, benign waters of casual indifference. We made eye contact, and I seized the opportunity to offer my introduction. She sat alone, invitingly, at a table in a dimly lit corner, her male acquaintances somewhat conspicuous in their absence, as though perfectly oblivious to her charm.

Her lips played hopscotch, unscrupulously toying with a cigarette rolled between her nimble fingers. She spoke first.

“I’m lady.” She paused, accenting coolly underneath a shroud of smoke. “What are you?”

I smiled and, abstinent in my reaction, cheerfully retorted, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

She appeared slightly defensive, and this only intrigued me further. “You gonna sit down?” she snarled.

I accepted her invitation and made myself comfortable at the table, strategically seated. Her taste for hard liquor had become all the more apparent.

In a moment I felt the forces of my power at full throttle, as I had the uncanny notion of a shared experience vaguely situated in my sinewy past.

By now it was no secret that I had fallen for the bait cast by the clutches of her dismal allure.

She granted me a considerable excuse to examine her physique. Upon closer inspection I could hardly help but notice the detail of a rather large tattoo emblazoned on her right thigh, partially hidden by her shoddy, second-hand miniskirt.

Sensing that I had become curious to see the rest, she yanked up the edge of the skirt, revealing the hidden half. The immense scope of the ugliness had surprised me. It was larger than my fist, and looked as if it had been left half-finished by some drunken barbarian as a cruel practical joke.

I made out what appeared to be a carrot and an onion, trimmed with radishes, centered around the head of a grossly misproportioned German shepherd, t`he words “Do or die” scrawled in badly rendered gothic script - its Spanish equivalent underneath.

Upon inquiring as to the origins of the ghastly, ill-conceived work of artistry, she spat out the remainder of her whiskey glass, cackling “‘Ya ever been down ta T.J.?”

“I owe you an apology,” I said.

“Why? You’ve done nothing to be ashamed of.”

Her eyes were kind and conciliatory. She told me that I was gentler in the way I went about my dirty business than the men who normally engaged her services.

“Still,” I insisted, “I’m sorry I used you. I feel I should reveal to you the awful truth that each month, each day, each hour you seek to conceal from yourself.”

“I don’t have any secrets,” she said.

The terrible power that had been placed in me was like an endless turret of microscopic lenses, revolving and clicking into place, displaying still greater magnifications of her condition.

“I know I can help you. I was given the power to help you.”

“You? A preacher?” She threw me a cold look. “I don’t need that kind of help.”

“It’s not religion,” I said, “only truth.”

[sacrcastically]
“And the truth shall set me free, right, reverend?”

“As a matter of fact, yes, it will.”

She moved closer to me and stared, softening her darkly alluring eyes in order to mock intimacy.

“Tell me all about myself,” she said.

So I began with a question:  “You don’t believe that there’s any such thing as sin, do you?” I asked.

“Not really, reverend. Sin is for people who can afford to live right, because they have the money to buy what they need.”

I persisted:  “When somebody does something wrong or hurts another person, then, it’s only a mistake? – it’s only their wretched outer condition, not their decayed soul?”

She seemed confused: “I guess, whatever you say.”

“Are you happy?” I queried.

“No, I’m not very happy.”

With that she averted her challenging stare and I saw my opportunity:

“Well, I’m going to tell you what I know about you. Your real name is Katherine Agassi and you’re from Buena Park. You moved to L.A. in 1982 at the age of fourteen, after your stepfather kicked you out of the house.

“Your real father was a heavy drinker and owned a hardware store on Beach Boulevard. Your mother was an invalid and your father resented her because her medication was expensive.

“He molested you from the time you were eight years old until you were twelve. He’d throw you a paper airplane every time he had the urge; the scrawled note inside was his love letter: “Mommy is going to bed early tonight;” “Mommy says it’s OK to play;” “Daddy loves rhubarb pie.” You never told your mother. He still appears in your dreams, though disfigured – a hole straight through his misshapen head.  Strapped to a wheelchair, singing to you in a language only you and he understand: “Rooby’s booby, rooby’s Roo.” In this dream you always point him out, but none of the other family members can see him; he’s visible only to you.

When you were twelve he died suddenly, leaving your mother with the hope of finding a new husband. Soon she fell in love with a man and remarried.”

“Your new stepfather was nice to you at first, until you discovered that he was embezzling from your deceased father’s business. He covered his tracks before you were able to expose his crime to your mother, so that when you came to her with the news, she chose not to believe you.  You made life unbearable for both of them until he finally kicked you out.”

I noticed she had lifted her hands and placed them on top of her head as though my torrent of words were rain.

“Don’t do this,” she whispered.

“But you must hear me,” I said.

“How is this happening?” Again, in a whisper.

I turned the revolving lenses of the lucid and maniacal microscope backward in magnification, and relinquished my powers of speech to the spectral intelligence that now guided me.

“Katherine, tonight must be the night that you begin to take responsibility for your own life. Your life has become unmanageable. In fact, you don’t know how to live. You’ve suffered a tragic break in your affinity for the world. Have you ever thought of dropping the body?”

“What do you mean?

“I mean to go exterior, get a new perspective on the physical universe.”

Suddenly her eyes flashed red with anger. “Shouldn’t you be telling me to pray every day, to do good deeds and act the way God tells me to act?”

“Nothing is imposed upon us like that from on high. We’re not isolated, we’re part of everything, and we choose, in large part, what happens to us. Yet you have chosen to lead a kind of doomed existence, much like your mother, your father, your stepfather and those before them.”

Her eyes were fixed upon a point beyond anything in the small, smoky room. She seemed as far away as her progenitors.

“All of you have chosen this,” I told her. “All of you stand end to end in one long, unbroken line of abuse; from the sins of the fathers to the slow and terrible retribution by the sons and daughters against their own children in every successive generation, producing a ghost network so vast and so malign it constitutes a conspiracy of sin. And you, Katherine, are merely the latest prey, part and parcel, inextricably bound. Please, let us pray together...”

She rose up from the table and with staunch resolve, made her way out of the place, ignoring my pleas and disappearing into the cool night air.

I knew I had been too forthcoming with the truth she had sought all her life to deny, yet could not disavow. It became obvious that I had been too licentious in the use of my powers, and my challenge now lay in rectification.

I stalked the streets for what must have been hours, reeling from the encounter and succinct in my strategy. I was becoming drawn closer and closer to this luckless creature, whom I’d met only a short while ago, and now sought to eke out her irresistibly hardboiled likeness through every vapid cobblestone of every damp alley in this wretched town.

It was as if the soles of my shoes, in league with this new determination, were being guided by a subterranean skeletal system, conspiring to plod further into pleated pockets of comtempt as I whisked luminously past every fathomable hybrid of society.

I felt as though both my legs had separated themselves from the rest of my body and now carried out their agenda with unbridled stamina a full six to seven steps ahead of their upper half.

How now, I thought to myself, how now would I gladly give anything to have her back and welcome her with redemption.

I looked up at the battered street sign, and against the pitch blackness, made out my location. I had ended up in the alleyway behind the Miramar Hotel at 5th and Main, a humid rupture in the infrastructure of the city that had somehow escaped the notice of sanitation crews, police detectives or exterminators. I waded through a mulch of unidentifiable debris, the viscosity of which seemed to increase as I progressed deeper into the canyon.

Suddenly a car screeched to a halt on the main street, and a woman flew out in a rage. As the car sped off she howled like a wounded animal, “Motherfucking scum!”

It was her, of course. I had found her where we had our first liason. She ran toward me, crying, and when she reached out to me I felt her left arm moist with blood.

“Reverend,” she pleaded, “help me. Those motherfuckers tried to kill me.”

I examined her arm and found a serious knife wound. “I used my arms to defend myself,” she explained.

We walked a few blocks to my modest tabernacle, where I applied a tincture of mercurachrome to her arm and provided her with a place to rest. She consoled herself with a bottle of whiskey from my cabinet, and dabbed some into her wound for good measure.

“I really care about you,” I said feebly.

“At least somebody does,” was her reply.

Then she asked me a curious question:  “Reverend, do you think that I’m a...a bad person?”

Before I could reply she changed the subject. “You’ve got a real nice place, Reverend. I lived with my aunt and uncle in a big house once. They had beautiful furniture.”

I saw her back straighten and her eyes grow clearer as she assumed an attitude of pride. “You know,” she said with welling tears, “I used to be happy once.”

Suddenly the bottle of whiskey slipped from her hand and crashed to the floor. “Oh, I’m sorry, Let me clean it up.”

“No,” I said, “no,” “The pieces are too sharp. I’ll go upstairs and get a broom.”

I climbed the little spiral staircase behind the pulpit to a loft I had been cleaning, stumbling around in the dim, cramped storage space, trying to recall where I had placed the broom. After some blind groping I found it and descended the steps with a dustpan, .

When I returned, she was crumpled on the floor. I rushed to approached her and kneeled down. Resting in her hand was a glistening shard. An elongated pool of blood extended from a gash in her throat.

“Katherine!!!”

[Long pause]

My love has died with the awful groan of steel girders in a quake, twisting in their foundations as if struggling to break free of the tyrannical earth.

. . .like the futility of well-chosen words arranged conscientiously on elegant stationery as they make their journey south to the waste basket in the corner.

My love has died like the seeds of reason, cast upon hostile soil in hopes of inseminating virtue.

[ponders]
“There is a meanness in me.”

[his back to audience, ponders again]

“I’ve been tricked. Satan, it was you!!”