Crescent City palms the kid another snot-smeared C-note.
At the curb, a uniformed chauffeur holds open the door of a gleaming Town Car and asks, “To the airport, Mr. Jizz Guzzler?” The chauffeur is, as the desk clerk mentioned, of African descent. They shake hands amiably.
Settling himself in the backseat, Crescent says, “Yes, the domestic terminal, please, my porch-monkey friend.”
Their bubbly, laughing conversation continues in this wretched vein all the way to the curb at the airport. No one takes offense. No slur seems to be off-limits. Even the people we drive past, walking on the sidewalks, seated in other cars, they all smile blissfully, as if immune to insults. If they catch Crescent’s eye they smile and flip him a middle finger. The honking horns are deafening. The toothy smiles are blinding. Everyone is gloriously Heaven-bound, but only if they swear sufficiently.
Behind the wheel, the driver sneaks out a cloud of intestinal foulness, instantly filling the car with the fetid reek of his stagnant entrails.
“Good one!” Crescent City says, inhaling deeply. “The angel Madison must really love you.”
“It’s the smell of salvation, brother,” replies the driver. “Breathe it up!”
In the airport terminal we pass a newsstand. The headline on the cover of Newsweek says, “A Rude Religious Revolution: The Boorists Have Arrived!” Time magazine announces: “The %&!?//$ Road to Redemption.” On a television monitor mounted near the ceiling of the concourse a CNN news presenter says, “Boorists now claim their messiah has been resurrected….”
As we walk toward our gate of departure, my chubby ham-hock legs hurry to keep pace with his long, zombie stride. Loping along, of course he can’t hear me, not while he’s sober, but he maintains a steady patter. To everyone in the airport he must look like an untreated schizophrenic, his not-clean shirt flapping open and untucked. Not that anyone seems upset by the sight of a lunatic dressed in rags yammering to himself. No, now that humanity is assured a permanent seat at the right hand of God, they’re grinning with glee. Their eyes are misted with righteousness.
“Your timing, little dead girl, could not have been better,” says Crescent. “We have bullshit laws about driving sober and laws about always wearing shoes and not owning giant boa constrictors, only we didn’t have laws about the most important stuff: getting saved.” He says, “People were starving to know those rules.”
This new religion, Boorism, makes death look like an all-expenses-paid luxury vacation that lasts until the end of time.
“You created world peace! Nobody’s a gay anymore, or a Jew or a person from Africa,” he rants, forging ahead. “Look at us! We’re all ‘Boors’!”
It’s simple, explains Crescent City. My parents staged a massive publicity campaign to announce that their dead daughter had contacted them from beyond the grave. They told the world that I was now an angel in Heaven, rubbing elbows with the Kennedy brothers and Amy Winehouse, and I had bestowed upon them a fail-safe, surefire blueprint for attaining salvation. They issued a blitz of press releases to blab that I was within the pearly gates, riding a cloud and strumming a harp. Ridiculous as this sounds, this is the milieu of Camille and Antonio.
“Boorism isn’t the real name for our faith,” Crescent says. “That’s just a phony label the media vultures invented to pigeonhole us. Officially we refer to ourselves as apostles of Madlantis.”
Realistically I can’t slight my folks for getting so excited. Their previous theology of “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” must’ve offered scant emotional comfort in the face of their only child being killed on her birthday. Yes, I expired on my birthday in an erotic-asphyxiation scenario that shames me to revisit here.
This is the death of angst. Forget Nietzsche. Forget Sartre. Existentialism is dead. God has been resurrected, and people have a road map for attaining glorious immortality. In Boorism, everyone who’d abandoned religion now has a path by which to return to God, and that feels… great. Just look at their strolling, patient gaits. In light of this new salvation, mortal life feels like the final day of school.
It’s not the threat of Hell or jail or societal shunning that’s brought this bliss. It’s the complete assurance of paradise. It makes the inevitability of death shine like a final cosmic Friday preceding an infinite party weekend in Mazatlán.
As we wait in the jetway, Crescent says, “In Heaven the first thing I’m getting myself is a new liver. And a new body, and hair like I used to have.” Clutching his boarding pass, he says, “I swear, once I’m in Heaven I’m never touching drugs. Never again.”
“Amen,” a voice says. It’s a woman standing behind us in line. She’s shouldering a tote bag and thumbing the buttons of a PDA as she says, “In Heaven I’m eating steak and fries for every meal, and I’m still never weighing more than one hundred fifteen, maximum.”
“Amen,” says another voice waiting in line.
“In Heaven,” says another voice, farther back in the jetway, “I’m going to reestablish contact with my kids and give them the kind of father those good kids deserve.”
“Hallelujah!” someone shouts. Several “Praise bes” echo in the narrow jetway space. With that, everyone in line volunteers his or her aspirations for eternity.