You never hear a Nobel Prize winner saying, "God told me
to do it." Physicists who unravel the mysteries of space-time, writers
who forge the consciousness of their race in the smithies of their souls, humanitarians
who save entire generations from poverty and cholera-- these luminaries, whose
Great Works one might legitimately believe to have been touched by the divine,
seldom if ever profess to have heard the voice of the Creator whispering into
their ear. It's only the lowlifes-- serial cannibals, plutocratic warmongers,
guys who hit the Daily Double at Aqueduct three days in a row-- that profess
to have a private radio frequency for exclusive two-way conversations with the
Almighty.
Case in point: Last time I was in the city which my father so fetchingly refers
to as San Fag Crisco, the Gypsy and I spent some time with a personage whom
we believed at the time to be an expert shoe-polisher. This shoe-polisher went
by the name of Peter, and in spite of (or perhaps because of) his modest station
in life, it appeared that Our Holy Father had found occasion to exchange words
with him at least once. I know this because this Peter distinguished his brand
of full-service shoe care from that of lesser, no-frills carriers by throwing
in his life story at no additional charge. The shine took nearly two hours.
I'm sure Peter's story was fascinating, and I wish I could give you all the
details, but, unfortunately, I wasn't paying particularly close attention. You
see, at that moment I myself happened to be waiting to have a few words with
the Man Upstairs. Specifically, I was waiting for a Sign, as in, "O Lord,
give me a sign."
As requests for divine guidance go, asking for a sign is relatively modest--
it's not as if you're asking God to cancel all his appointments for the rest
of the afternoon and sit down with you for a lengthy heart-to-heart. All you're
asking is that the Deity throw something your way to catch your eye. A bolt
of lightning or a levitating goat's head is nice, but anything from a blond
child holding a black cat to a kind roll of the Magic 8-Ball will do in a pinch.
You already know what your question is, and you even know the answer you're
looking for. You just need some stimulus that you can plausibly interpret as
the go-ahead from old Jehovah.
And on this particular day, I was waiting for the Voice From Above to say,
"Buy the Dürer from the midget Jew in green velour."
It had happened the way these things always happen. We were just strolling
around and there it was, The Martyrdom of St. Catherine. And then a little old
woman had walked up to me, grabbed me by the hand, and peered deep into my eyes.
Her eyes twinkled like the giant topaz she had hanging from a long gold chain
around her neck, shiny yellow against the lush green, and she said to me, "You
know what this is."
"I need to sit down," I'd said, once we'd escaped the tiny crone's
spooky presence. "How about here," th Gypsy had said. And that's
how we'd found ourselves getting a two-hour shine and a life story almost as
tattered and frayed as my boots were going to be by the time Peter got done
with them. I felt cockeyed sitting there on the corner of 3rd and Market watching
and listening, eyeballs going two different directions, eardrums vibrating with
Peter's chatter and the footsteps of businessmen and, loudest of all, the voice
in my own head that said: "Albrecht Dürer? This has to be a message from
God."
So, as I say, I wasn't paying particularly close attention to Peter's story.
But what I did gather was this. Apparently God spoke to Peter and apparently
he bought it and it worked. God said, "Hey, Cracky, you wanna get clean?
You want to kick this shit? You're gonna fuck a 78-year-old woman and then,
you're going to move back in with your Ma." God promised to set him up
with his own business; The Pearly Gates Shoe Shine, that is what Peter called
his business. And that is how he and his disciple Paul-- who was slathering
my boots with an unknown substance that would soon transform the leather of
my Tony Lamas into a desiccated, friable material whose consistency closely
resembled that of the Dead Sea scrolls-- that is how it had come to pass that
he was spending two hours of his day polishing, or more precisely destroying,
my boots. Thanks, God.
"Never trust Kiwi. Kiwi is shit. Use Oso. Oso is the best. Those Mexicans
know how to shine their cowboy boots," Paul was saying to me. It was then
that a hopped-up jezebel missing at least twelve teeth squatted vulgarly down
next to me, grabbed a tin of polish from the ground and made as if to paint
her face with it. "That's just Mary," Paul said.
"Ignore her long enough and she'll go away." Peter said.
I heard the Gypsy luring Peter like a trout, asking, "So God told you
to sleep with a 78-year-old woman and you did it?" At that moment I imagined
Sandra Grombowitz, the art-dealer in the emerald green velour suit with the
giant topaz, standing in front of Peter naked saying, Not bad for 78, eh? "It
wasn't as bad as you would think," Peter said. I didn't want to picture
an septuagenarian giving this man a blowjob. I lost myself in the thought of
what an Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) would look like hanging over my bed. The
Martyrdom of Saint Catherine: my grandmother's namesake, one in a series of
15, 1492. Superb. Excellent. Original. Ridiculously beyond my means.
"And that's not the half of it," Peter said. The Gypsy turned in
his chair and winked at me. Then he deadpanned, "God told you to dress
up like a woman and you did it?"
Let me say here, that even though I was sitting next to a gypsy, he happens
to be the straightest, most heterosexual man I've ever met. Period. The news
that a man would dress up like a woman coming from the mouth of The Gypsy sounded
more like, "You fucked a kitten!"
As it turned out, the Gypsy's guess had not been that far off. God had told
Peter to don a crop-top and some ass-huggers, hit the streets for a fortnight
and wait until he was contacted again. Then, Peter told us, surprise, that he
did it and 28 days later he was strolling around the Tenderloin and received
another message. This time it came from the mouth of a whore leaning up against
the wall of a Residency Hotel, smoking. And do you know what she said? And do
you know what she said? She said, "You look like a fucking idiot!"
Any schizophrenic can tell you that God isn't the only one who speaks to us.
So what I wanted to know was this-- how did Peter know it was God and not The
Devil? How does anyone know? How do I know weather or not the Dürer is in fact
a Dürer and not the work of, say, Hans Grobinger? Faith? When a man who takes
two hours to shine my shoes and destroys the boots I've had for 16 years tells
me he is on a Mission from God, and when another, The Holy Father of my country,
George Bush, declares war on my people, tell me, how am I to have faith in anything
but art? It was all right there in the Meder Index. So what? It had a little
water damage that someone had obviously tried to repair with Wite-Out and a
black Bic Rollerball. There were two small droplets of something that looked
like Marinara sauce on the cape of one of the fleeing heathens. What did I care?
Who am I, Tina Chow? What I did want to know was, "Why?"
"Sometimes even we make mistakes," Sandra said, squeezing my hand
knowingly, asking me, "How do you know so much about Albrecht Dürer?"
God told me to do it? God told me to do it? Hey, if that had been my God I'd
say, "Hey, God; go fuck yourself." My God doesn't eat her young, declare
war or save crack-addicts. My God has long red hair and big tits (Not that it
matters, but she looks just like Susan Sarandon) and says, "You-- for your
suffering, for your hard work: I'm going to give you an Albrecht Dürer, beautiful."
I rifled my phone out of the bottom of my purse and called the Italian art
gallery. "Sandra," I said, "This is Alena.
"I'll take the Dürer."
Alena Nahabedian is a contributing editor to Lime
Tea, and one of the main arguments for our getting around to putting up author
pages where you can read all of a writer's LT stories in one place. Unfortunately,
we ran out of cocaine, so you'll have to use the archive
like everyone else.
