Lazarus

When I was a kid, my mom drugged me into Lazarus. Not dragged – drugged. To get me in, she fed me promises of McDonald’s, and back then that meant the world to me because everything was simple and without complication and McDonald’s was a wonderland to me. If you asked me then, I would have said that McDonaldland was Heaven, and Grimace and the Hamburglar were angels and Ronald was God. I would have done about anything you could imagine for a Happy Meal. It was the fries that got me. The onions, the ketchup, the pickles, the cheese and the bun of a cheeseburger, and the mystery of the plastic toy inside of a little plastic bag. 

Lazarus, in case you don’t know, maybe if you are Dutch or reading this from some other planet where Lazarus has never been or never will be, was a high-end department store. It may still be, I don’t know, but it no longer exists in my town and has been relegated to memories. It was washed out some years ago and the building where it once was became something else, then something else, and then something else until it became nothing at all. I hated Lazarus. I loathed it with such a passion that it took mom promising me a Happy Meal for me to go and not to fuss about it. When I was there, I was miserable. I was sure that Lazarus was Hell.

Still, I never acted like a spoiled brat. I never cried or threw myself on the ground like I saw other kids do in fits of abjection that mocked grand mal seizures or demonic possession, kicking and flailing arms and legs wildly, biting tongues, cursing in Latin. But my mom was so obsessed with me being happy and content that the slightest look of displeasure in my eyes would make her speak with an entirely different voice, as though by the altered pitch and timbre of her words she could hypnotically make me happy. It wasn’t baby talk at all, but it was an entirely different voice. The voice of an angel, as I would imagine it. She drugged me with promises of McDonald’s, and such promises are a mother’s rufies.

If that didn’t work, she would throw in a G.I. Joe of my choice, which was $3.75 at Hart’s. I usually didn’t hold out for anything more than the Happy Meal because I guess, even as a kid, I knew we didn’t have it. Mom often went to Lazarus not able to afford anything, but just to look at clothes. Sometimes she would try them on and look at herself in the mirror and I would sit there Indian-style on the thin carpet in the middle of a wigwam of slacks and blouses on the metal bones of silver racks and watch her standing there, smiling for a minute before the smile inevitably faded. It was as though, for just a moment, she was another person. A person she would rather be. She looked very pretty in those clothes, but they would come off in favor of what she wore in, what she had bought at some yard sale. I didn’t understand it then, but in order to get me those Happy Meals and G.I. Joes and whatever else I got, she shopped out of garages and from lawns rather than from any department store. 

I guess Lazarus was where she played dress-up. Rarely did we ever walk out of the store with a bag of anything. Only when there was some sale and she had extra money, which was not often. Sometimes I wandered around in the store when she was in the dressing room. She made me promise to stay right where I was, which was usually in the middle of those racks of clothes with other kids nearby. Sometimes other kids would come into my wigwam and they would sit there with me and we would play or talk like Indians about buffaloes and shit Indians talked about. But sometimes they would leave to settle their own rack. 

Sometimes we would play cowboys and Indians and someone would get scalped or shot. Or we would play G.I. Joe and run amuck in the store until some saleswoman or another mom would snatch us up and make us sit there and think about it until enough time elapsed that we could do it all over again after the frown wore off their face, or they seemed to forget. It was never a set time. There is an innate clock in all kids to know when it is okay to do something you were once told not to do all over again. There was nothing quite as sobering as the scorn of an angry mom’s eyeball, but nothing quite as exhilarating as the indulgence into one’s own over-active imagination. There is and never will be a drug like it.

My mom had it easy with me. Some kids were real assholes. Even when I was seven I could tell and I was embarrassed by them, as though we were in some kind of guild or union, some fraternity of sorts, and their behavior reflected poorly upon me. Mom would sometimes say I am glad you don’t act like that boy, or that one. The one who threw himself down in the middle of the store and bawled like a bitch; the one who ran out into the parking lot and nearly got flattened by a truck; the grimy one who picked his nose and ate it. But my mom loved all kids and never said a disparaging word about any of them. Even the kids I didn’t like, she loved. She felt sorry for them because she imagined they got picked on or weren’t loved enough by their moms or dads, which was probably true.

As a young boy, I had an old soul. As far as my behavior went, I was like an old man in a little boy’s body. Though I was always imaginative and curious, I was proper and well-behaved. I also saw and noticed things that other kids didn’t. The look on my mom’s face when she had to take those clothes off and put her old ones back on. The difference in how her hand felt going in to Lazarus as opposed to leaving it. The way she sometimes stared out a window. I don’t know why it was that way. It just was.

Yard sales were much the same. The places where my mom actually bought her clothes, which were usually folded or tossed on a fold-out banquet table and marked with a price in sharpie on pieces of torn-off masking tape. She bought her shoes, purses, perfume and jewelry there, too. What other women didn’t want. What they threw out. What they were gifted by their husbands or relatives some Christmases ago, which they finally could get rid of, or what they simply tired of for want of something new. I would sit in the backseat of our car and she would say something about “all I got for just five dollars” with an air of capitulation, but with that altruistic smile I knew well. 

My dad never bought her anything other than chocolates or a steak dinner now and then when the issue was forced and, of course, he ate half himself. He was let off the hook by her over-obsessive desire to make sure her kids had all that we wanted, that Santa Claus never let us down even when the factory shut down, or a birthday never came and went without whatever we wanted being gifted to us. It wasn’t that my dad didn’t care. He just didn’t care as much as mom, which was quite a herculean feat.

I never drive past a yard sale and fail to think of her. Nor am I ever in church and they give a sermon involving Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead and I not think of those lazy afternoons when I went with her and she tried on clothes she couldn’t afford. As the chasm of time grows wider between now and then, which are two opposite worlds in different and ever-widening galaxies, much is forgotten. Much falls into the cracks and disappears forever into some obscure oblivion and is only revived in quick meteoric bursts of unpredictable and fleeting recollection, tailing and fading as fast as it came. And that of childhood which wasn’t captured in a picture, is all but lost. But even at pictures I sometimes stare blankly, not remembering the circumstances around them, as though I am not looking at myself at all, but someone foreign that is me.

But I find that from time to time, as I sit somewhere and drift away in that contemplative fantastic voyage on a languid cruise ship of lost memories, ever so briefly I will remember things I had previously forgotten, things I had thought lost. And what I remember of Lazarus today is the one time I wandered away and that man snatched me up. He had vice grips for hands and grabbed me by the shoulders and dragged me into the men’s dressing room. There were straight pins from dress shirts scattered on the wood bench seat, and I remember his face distinctly now so close to mine. He wore brown plastic sunglasses, the tag still dangling from them, and his hair was perfect like it was sprayed on.

“You got to help me, kid! You got to help me!” he screamed madly. His voice was strange and strained and he smelled of plastic and dye and a polyester-cotton blend. The Hawaiian shirt he wore. The crisp khaki shorts. The new rubber of the flip-flops on his blanched-white feet. I thought this was it. I thought I would be abducted and was destined for a milk carton because I strayed away, like mom always told me not to for that very reason. So not to be like that one boy she always talked mournfully about. I knew my best bet was to run, but he blocked the doorway. He must have known what I was thinking because he spread his arms out. “Please!” he begged me.

“I can’t help you,” I sighed meekly. “Let me go!”

There were scraps of plastic on the floor and the cardboard necks of dress shirts scattered like little boy bones. There were tags and inspected by numbers stuck to the walls and floor where there were more wayward straight pins and tissue paper like pieces of ripped-off flesh or giant flakes of ogre dandruff.

“All I need is for you to get me some other clothes and then help me get out of here! Just show me the way to the door! I can’t see!”

His lips didn’t move when he talked. I was scared and pissed myself. The warm trickle tickled down my goose-pimpled legs and soaked the ankles of my socks and pooled in my blue sneakers. My worst fears burst like unrelenting fireworks. I wasn’t getting McDonald’s that day, and I likely wouldn’t ever see my mom again. He continued to beg me to go get him clothes and then I realized it was my opportunity out. I could just go and never come back. I could find my mom and tell her what happened and it would all be over. The clothes, he said again, were over on the rack not far from the dressing room. There was a red Member’s Only jacket. A white t-shirt. Some Calvin Klein jeans and a pair of white tennis shoes. It’s all laid out over there. 

When I agreed and he moved away from the door, I bolted out of there in a flash. I ran straight to the ladies’ department where my mom would be, but just before I got there I stopped. I looked back and saw him looking at me from the dressing room. Imploring me to return. I felt bad for him and I believed him. So I ran back towards the dressing room, my shoes squishing soggily with urine sopping socks and I grabbed the clothes he listed and a few more things and carried them in to him. I dumped them at his strange white feet and tried to go, but he grabbed me again with that strong and merciless grip and yanked me back into the terror of that dressing room.

I was dumb, I remember thinking. I had a chance to escape and I didn’t take it. I deserved what was coming. I thought he would stab me. I thought he would cut my body parts off one by one. I didn’t know what happened to kids who got stolen by strangers because I was only 8 or 9 then. So I thought of the worst things I could think of, and that is what would happen. Dismemberment. 

But somehow I wiggled free and when I was out of his reach, he again plead for me not to go. To wait for him to change. He needed me to show him to the exit. I scooted away on my butt like a crab using my hands for feet, never dreaming I could move so fast in that toilsome way. If he came out and grabbed me by my ankles I was dead. But he didn’t. He just looked at me. He seemed confined to the dressing room and I was again free. He had the saddest looking face I had ever seen.

“Mischief!” the Lazarus man barked scornfully. He was a cold and remorseless man. A Nazi in a former life, I was sure. I think he had a glass eye, which to me makes anyone all the more sinister. He had me snatched up by my shirt. He told my mom I had been in the dressing room playing with a mannequin. He told her I had dressed and undressed the mannequin and the mannequin was broken apart. 

“See for yourself,” he went on, prosecuting his case against me, presenting his evidence. My mom and I looked in and there was the stranger. Only he wasn’t alive anymore. He was broken apart. An arm here. A leg there. Still wearing those brown plastic sunglasses. He was as the Lazarus man said, a mannequin. Dismembered.

“I didn’t do this! They must’ve did it to him! He was real!” I cried. My face was soaked with a sudden storm of tears. I was nearly hyperventilating. “He grabbed me and told me to get him clothes and to show him the way out. I swear! Mom! I swear!”

My mom hushed me and was embarrassed by the accusation, but sided with me. “If my boy says that’s how it was, then, well, that’s how it was. We’ll be leaving now.”

“But ma’am!” the wiry clerk argued futilely.

“I peed mom,” I admitted on the way out.

“I know,” she replied, smiling down at me. I was walking like a cowboy penguin.

“I should have helped him! They killed him!” I bawled. “They killed him!” She gave me a hug and told me not to think about it anymore. She said everything was okay and I believed her. She held my hand and walked me outside. The sun was warm and mom had a change of clothes for me in the car as though she had expected this sort of thing to happen. She was always prepared like that. And in the big backseat of the station wagon with the sun beaming in from the back window, I slipped off those wet clothes and changed into the dry ones and it was like I became brand-new. She put my soiled clothes and shoes in a plastic bag and nothing more was said of the mannequin.

Mom always believed me. The time I was abducted by aliens at the park, which caused me to be an hour late for dinner. The time I was followed by two brick-faced KGB agents in the library, where I left my new jacket. The time a deranged slasher broke into a house where I was having a sleep-over, which caused me to run home at 4 in the morning. The time I was reading those Playboys for the articles. The time a wolf bit me and ripped my pants in the process. The time my canoe was tipped over by the souls of dead Indians in the lake, which caused me to get all wet. 

She always believed me and there is no more important thing in the world than having someone love and believe in you without exception, even when you don’t sometimes believe in yourself. Some say she encouraged in me an impractical dreamer with a dangerous and wild imagination. But a naysayer has never been one to listen to, much less one to respect and to follow. Naysayers make bombs and propagate fear and misery in our world. Our parents make us into who we are, sometimes staunchly, sometimes subtly. Dreamers or naysayers. Builders or destructors. Lovers or haters. And regardless of any hurdles in reality that I’ve stumbled on along the way, I wouldn’t want to be any other way. I am Oz, not the witch or a flying monkey. I am Wonka, not Augustus Gloop or Veruca Salt.

Curious things, she called them with a grin. She said they happen to befall me the way good or bad things befall other people. You are neither lucky or unlucky, neither fortunate or unfortunate, she said softly. You are wildly imaginative and you are who you are and your life will be a fantastic hot-air balloon voyage through a mediocre world of gray dull mundanity that will always try to ground you. But you will never be consumed by money or vanity or materialism. Never come down, she implored. Float on, Charlie. Float.

She fostered in me a great sense of imagination because never once did she stomp it out, not even when she didn’t believe me. Not one single time. She let me go on and on, let me conjure up fiction from reality to cope with the dearth of happiness in the austere existence of our black-and-white mundane and often cruel world. She defended me against any doubters, and the improbable and curious occurrences of my life continued so improbably and curiously that I don’t ever expect to have adequate time to detail them fully. Mostly good, but some bad, though all have been interestingly had. I cannot say that she purposefully did it to make me into a creative being who sees everything the way I uniquely do. I have no idea her intent or purpose in so doing, if such even existed, but she is why I look at the world from the clouds and why I drift away while others are so obsessed in fitting molds and with the obvious and false sense of purpose to be as boring as humanly possible. Predictable and plain as vanilla ice cream. To like all the same things that everyone else likes, which is the only explanation for pop music, and to loathe all the same things that everyone else loathes. To live in the belief and drama of a constant state of crisis.

I’ve never dreamed I would be delivering my mother’s eulogy. I thought I’d be in a Turkish prison when she died, or deep-sea fishing with some Colombian drug lord, or still on another planet teaching English in space, wittingly yet unwittingly, for the seamlessness of an impending invasion. I thought the eulogy would fall on a more responsible brother, or one of her evil sisters by virtue of their obstinate self-righteous flare for egomaniacal theatrics and homespun kinfolk imbecility. Or some priggish minister who is just a page turn out of The Crucible who would say all the same things and offer a eulogy by number. It is a drab thing to consider. My mom’s meat laying behind me in that coffin like crate of pork salami before they wheel her away to the barbecue and make ashes of her so that someone will be given a plastic box to dispense of her in the ocean somewhere. I doubt I will be entrusted with that box, but if I am, I will deliver her because that was her wish. To feed the fish that once fed her.

I thought to say that I am here as her ambassador, talking her into Heaven, as though she would need me to do so. But God knows I am no sleazy meat salesman. In fact, I am quite the opposite. Mom always said I was an angel. I guess it took me this long to figure out that I actually am. Angels don’t have wings and halos and all that. We are more like Michael Landon in Highway to Heaven, without his terrific hair. I believe her, just as she believed me. I am an angel and I am here to take her to Heaven with me when all the formality of dying is over. So whether I am given that damn box of ashes or not is of little consequence. I will be flying mom’s soul up to Heaven later on as instructed. So say your goodbyes now.  

There are other angels here in the back row trying not to be seen. Please, don’t turn to look at them. Please. They come to funerals like scouts come to amateur baseball games looking for good Heaven material. A couple pitchers and someone to hit lead-off next year, so to speak. Or maybe they have come just to evaluate me. To see if I am worthy to be counted among them. To fly us home when this is all said and done. Heaven isn’t at all what you think it is, and chances are most of us aren’t getting in. If I wasn’t an angel with a season pass and an immunity to sin, I would not be getting in, either, let me tell you. God frowns upon womanizing and those who cavort with hookers as I once did, but this world was fascinating to me and got the best of me at times, all the while I thought I was getting the best of it.

I don’t know what the criteria is for getting in. It isn’t written down anywhere, as far as I know, and there isn’t a checklist. Everyone just assumes they will make it, or they choose not to believe in anything. But I have trouble believing that you can just click your heels together and verbally accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior and that punches your ticket. Or the Catholic hustle of tithe. Those are awful thoughts, if so. But then again, it is gratifying in a way to know that it could be without complication. Still, I like to think that it was invented by foul people for their own sake, and that isn’t the way it is at all. I don’t claim to know that which I don’t.

I’ve spent the better part of the past week thinking and talking about Lazarus, the department store. Someone told me they didn’t think it was high-end, as I had described it, but I guess that is a matter of perspective. Anything above K-Mart and Sears was high-end to me. Or maybe it just seemed that way for their prodigious wealth of mannequins. 

Then I thought of Lazarus the man Jesus raised after four days in the tomb. And there was a viewfinder of images, click, click, click, popping through my brain. A history of paintings and coloring pages from Sunday school of the event. There is nothing more imaginative and grand than the story of God and creation. And it shames by comparison the pedestrian and sterile view of modern science, the ever-changing discipline that is limited in scope and highly-erratic and radically different century to century. It is by no great wonder at all that I, with my thoughts and creative zeal as they are, identify my origins as that from intelligent design of Holy God, rather than from that of Charles Darwin and an antediluvian tadpole.

How unfortunate for Lazarus that Jesus had to preform the miracle to revive him. Lazarus was a friend of Jesus’ and surely would have made the list. Was he there already enjoying that eternal paradise only to be plucked back to life by Jesus at the petitioning of a sobbing sister. It made me think of how we mourn death so much and wish to avoid it at all costs, rather than to look forward to it. Not that we ought to seek it. But if we have faith, why would we go to any extreme or inconvenience to avoid it? Some of us squirm in our seats at funerals thinking of ourselves and our time. But the absolved have nothing to fear. We weep when people we love die. We are depressed when our favorite artists and actors and athletes pass on. But why? Our sorrow is either an indictment of our own lack of faith or our selfishness in wanting to keep those we love from their reward. Why wouldn’t we want our loved ones to be in an eternal paradise rather than to stew in the pains of mortality? Maybe it is only that we fear in our heart that they will fall short of the glory of God, or that such doesn’t exist.

Sure as anyone, my mom will go to Heaven so I do not weep. She will probably go door to door selling Tupperware or collecting for some charity. Or she’ll be yard sailing (sic) if there are yards to sail and garages to shop. I like to think though that Heaven will have an enormous Lazarus. One with an elevator and many floors and hundreds if not thousands of beautiful mannequins. 

Speaking of Lazarus, and mannequins, I am glad that Bill showed up. Bill was the mannequin I told you about. The one who grabbed me and implored me to help him escape when I was just a kid. I didn’t tell you the ending of that story, so I may as well tell you now while I have you as a captive audience. When Lazarus went out of business, I went to the store closing sale and bought him. He was in a box in the back somewhere and I think I gave them – fifteen bucks. Anyway, I put him together and he has been right since. He’s standing back there by the nice gardenia arrangement my mother’s podiatrist sent. Hey, Bill! Thanks for coming! He hasn’t moved since we have been here, but once you all leave, he’ll walk out with me. Maybe he will be a pallbearer if called upon, but he doesn’t like the limelight. He’s no primadonna human-being. But plastic or not, I hope Bill makes it to Heaven.

I like to think when mom and I get to Heaven she will go on the shopping spree she always deserved, but never afforded herself while living. For some reason though, I don’t think she will. I think she will lose all interest in Lazarus. I understand it now that I am older. Her selflessness. Her piety. We all will be tested at some point in life to see if we are worthy of celestial enshrinement and clicking our heels together or paying tithe will not get us there. That is a canard. None of us will know we are being tested when it happens. My mom passed the test by being the most selfless and loving person I have ever met. Maybe in Heaven, Lazarus will never close and maybe there I can be a kid again, bored out of my mind in the wigwam of a clothes rack, waiting for a Happy Meal, or a G.I. Joe. That would be my Heaven. Maybe God is a mannequin with sprayed-on hair, imploring us to help him find an exit so that we may find an entrance. To be human in an often inhumane world. Anyway, it’s a one-way ticket, whichever one you get.

Bill and I left the funeral, skipped the after-party, and sat around in nylon lawn chairs by a fire, drinking beer and talking about mom and life in general. A few days later, I was unexpectedly bequeathed my mom’s ashes. They came in a blue plastic box as ordinary as could be imagined. I bought a ticket to Ft. Lauderdale and so mom and I went. TSA gave me some flack about the container. They surmised that mom could easily be gun powder or nitroglycerin, so she wasn’t permitted to be a part of my carry-on. Bill agreed to watch the house if I promised to send him a postcard. Not many people care for those anymore, but he said he had a collection. He said he even had one of the old Lazarus.

Mom and I checked in at the hotel and then settled in at an open-air bar overlooking the ocean and had a couple drinks. I introduced myself and her to a few people. I met a beautiful Dutch girl named Angel and I laughed. It’s God playing a joke, I told her between loud songs some eighties and nineties cover band played.

What is joke? she asked with a thick Netherlandic accent. You’re name, I replied. You! She looked confused so I figured I should explain. I told her why I was there and she must have thought I was crazy when I told her that I was an angel. Not by name. An actual angel. No wings, I added. No halo. She pointed to the sky to confirm that she didn’t misunderstand what I said or that it wasn’t somehow lost in translation, and I smiled and solemnly shook my head. 

So you are angel, and I am Angel, she grinned, shooting another shot of whiskey as though it would help her better understand. I said that was about the size of it, though I told her to call me Lazarus, which was my angel name, because I don’t go by just angel or Charlie anymore.

But regardless of what she thought as to my sanity, I must have amused her well enough, or maybe she thought it was a good enough joke to watch play out to the end because she refused the desperate but compelling passes of a couple far more bronzed and younger fishermen, of sorts, who were drag netting the bar for a late-night catch. And she, by any account, would be quite a catch. They are the fishers of women, I declared jokingly, but she didn’t get it and I realized I didn’t even know if she was Christian or religious at all. But I thought it not a good subject to speak of so late in a beachside bar with my mother’s ashes and a pitcher of cold beer between us. She sat there loyally beside me, though I flattered her with no compliments and bought her no frilly drinks. And when the band quit, and the bar called last call, without hesitation, she followed me out to the water. 

It was late and the mesmeric moonlit ocean lied out beautiful and naked before us, the waves licking the warm white thighs of the sandy beach, eroding footsteps like elapsed memories of youth and crumbling the fortunes of millionaire sand castles so carelessly in the heat of their impassioned nightly love making. Little crabs darted around our feet and she giggled and danced away from them, saying something pretty in Dutch. I smiled at how innocent she seemed and how attractive she was in her white lacy romper with her lithesome legs, limber, and attractively sunburnt.

When we walked far enough, I, Lazarus, waded out into the water until it rose to my waste, rocking me gently, which made me think of mom lulling me to sleep in a rocking chair as a child, the one with the cherries painted on the dark-wood of the headrest which I could always see over her shoulder. And as Angel stood reverently behind me, quietly observing out of respect, knee-deep and with her palms seemingly caressing the thrusts of the incoming tide, I opened the box and poured my mom’s ashes gently into the water which took her with a vestal grace I had before never experienced. And when the box emptied and those ashes dispersed amongst the sand and salt, I expected that God would take me then in some fantastic and delusive way, my purpose having been thus fulfilled. 

Perhaps a shark would jerk me under in his jaws, or a wave would crumble me like one of those imperial sand castles, or a beautiful mermaid would throw her tender arms around my neck and pull me down. So I spread out my arms in acceptance of whatever was to come, surrendering the empty vessel and my living soul, but nothing occurred. Just more gentle laps and seductions of waves, ripples of time, and a fish that swam languidly by my leg.

I knew then that my life in this strange and curious world was but a tiny granule of salt in the body of an ocean that is way too vast and grand to conceive, much less to understand. But such that it was, it was yet complete. I was yet to float to where I should float and to settle to where I should settle. And so the Dutch girl and I went back to my hotel room, washed the sand from our naked bodies, and made love.   

Art courtesy: Methodist Modern Art Collection. 
John Reilly (1928-2010). 1962. Ripolin enamel on board.