Jesus on Rye

Because Mother Mary was crying bloody tears somewhere in Mexico, the Catholics were all saying Jesus was coming like they were Paul Revere. I read it on my phone as I sat at the bar I frequent called Lucky's. The owner's name is not Lucky and I've never gotten "lucky" in the bar, and by the looks of things, no one here is lucky or in any danger of getting lucky. A winning lottery ticket has never been sold here. The inhabitants of Lucky's are separate and distinct levels of unhappy or discontent, muddling through life. I am no different. It's an unoriginal name for a bar, but it's where I am comfortable and reasonably welcomed until I spout some inevitable crass but true comment that I probably wouldn't say sober. Some audacious claim against someone or something people revere that is counter to conventional thought and riles someone, which, in turn, only bolsters my theory that we are little more than dumb trout swimming upstream into the mouths of bears. That is my best metaphor for life. People just aren't quite ready to admit the complete absurdity of this over-commercialized and mind-numbing world because it is, after all, their world. And it is the only one they got. 

I drank beer after beer because it is April Fool's Day and no one even bothered to trick me this year and because the world is absolutely nauseating. The news media is a disgrace, dictating the narrative to gullible people who parrot their sensationalism in an effort to show they care or are enlightened more than those the media maligns. We live in an artificial rotting state of lunacy like maggots in dead meat where people empower their perceived victimhood and never let anyone live it down that their ancestors suffered some indignity that yours did not, and in turn, you owe them something. It is often based upon skin color, which is an utterly insipid thing and which is perpetuated by those who benefit from it most rather than an actual and illogical prejudice based on skin pigmentation. Maybe that is why Mother Mary was crying tears in Mexico. Because we are idiots. Now more than ever, as all the commercials say. 

I drank so much beer that my thoughts drown and I began to feel full and my stomach was cramped like those cages on the border on the TV news full of kids wrapped in shiny mylar blankets which make them look like Chipolte burritos. No one seems to care about them anymore now that the election is over and exploiting them for their desired result has been adequately satisfied. I get nervous about staying anywhere too long because I might have to shit if I do. "What if I have to shit?" That is what I could call the story of my life. I avoid airplanes, busses and trains for that reason. They have woefully inadequate toilet-to-passenger ratios. I wouldn't make it an hour in one of those migrant facilities. My nerves would be shot with the the thought of where I would shit.

My stomach rumbles thinking of it. I don't want to shit here. I've never shit here. In 20 years of coming to Lucky's, all I've ever done was paint the toilet yellow and that isn't going to change unless it absolutely cannot be helped. Shitting outside of my house is a big deal to me and causes me a great deal of anxiety. I shake thinking of it. I get lightheaded and queazy. It is almost as though I have invisible secret service agents in me and they whisk me home when it is time to go. Or, if it cannot be helped, they scrutinize the nearest facility and brief me of the situation in great detail so that I am more comfortable than I'd otherwise be. It is like landing a jet plane on an aircraft carrier. Or dropping a nuclear bomb on women and children. Things one must do because it cannot be helped.

Alcohol is my escape from madness and a cure for loneliness. But I need to start drinking whiskey. I need to drink Vodka. Or brandy. Something other than beer which lays on my stomach like a naked obese man on a thirty year-old La-Z-Boy recliner with busted springs. But then I'd be passed out somewhere. Defiling myself worse than what I already do. Pissing on myself like a broken fountain. Demanding flags never be at half mast. Telling everyone in detail how Martin Luther King, Jr. was an absolute fraud. Calling people communist bastards or quoting "Pulp Fiction" lines way too loudly, which they say isn't okay anymore. Saying witches probably deserved to burn. The Indians got what was coming. Or smiting redheads. I wouldn't be sober or coherent long and I'd fall in the parking lot like Custer at Little Big Horn. Defiant slurred words and truth still blazing from my scurrilous mouth. The bartender knows I can handle beer just as he knows that I can't handle whiskey. They know those sorts of things about people when they walk in. They don't need to go to a hilfalutin bartender school. They are 90 proof psychologists. 

There she sits. Object of my affection. Alyssa. Her name is that of Greek goddess. I don't know her last name and it is seems quite unnecessary. I only know her face. I see her on occasions when I come into the bar, earlier rather than later. She works a day job at the bank across the street, I overheard one time. Or maybe I imagined it and she is a nurse somewhere. "She's a happy hour regular," I was told by the snarky bartender when I asked a while ago after seeing her in passing. "A very, married regular," he added with an inauspicious grin. He must have known exactly why my curiosity was piqued. He must have seen the same sort of look a million times before on the faces of others with similar conniving interests in female patrons. After all, bars are common meeting places for the nefarious and otherwise tawdry relationships of all us stupid trout to spawn only to die shortly thereafter in the jaws of bears.

I am sure I wasn't the first to express latent or explicit interest in her. She was the epitome of grace who clearly took care of herself and who had wonderful posture, perfect and defined lines, and a refined sense of etiquette, which is a rare commodity these days. Especially around here where people wear pajama pants in public and meth is an apertif. She looked like a movie actress, but not of the modern era. Of an age sadly gone by. She was the most beautiful woman I've ever seen and I was envious of her husband in a way I've never been envious before. Her dopey-faced husband who wears tennis shoes and sports clothes to dinner and has a craft beer beard and a fake tan. He probably tans at the Casablanca, which is a popular local spray-tanning place that has absolutely nothing to do with the movie or the city in Morocco, other than sharing a name. I used to bang a girl who worked there until I could no longer stand the stink of that spray-on concoction and I got tired of her leaving her tan in my shower and smoking weed on my porch. 

"I will not be deterred by diamonds and vows," I quipped like a defiant John Paul Jones. But, in fact, I was deterred.  Lamentably deterred so much so that on the rare days I saw her, I barely looked at her because to see her was torturous. It was a jail cell with an ocean-view. She bedeviled me from the moment I saw her and everytime I looked I wanted to look again until it became some ruinous ruminating affair. I was like an alcoholic at a bar with no mouth to drink. But every look I stole was a meaningful look and I soaked up her beauty in my eyeballs as though they were sponges and she were liquid that in turn dripped the drug of her beauty onto my brain creating fantastic hallucinations of her otherworldly existence. Grand illusory delusions of us which were smoldering lustful subconscious desires, smoking from my pores. Something of a teenage boy in love for the first time with the unattainable flirtatious lipglossed babysitter who doesn't wear bras. 

She caught me gawking once or twice. She smiled at me politely, forgivingly or as though taking my obvious and reckless gapes as an innocent compliment rather than some lurid affront to her virtue. Much is either gained or lost in perceptions and much can be told of the object of such affection by how they react to gestures of innocent provocation. She usually has dinner with her aforementioned husband and another couple. But the husbands leave and the two wives remain and talk until around nine or so when I usually arrive and see her in passing, taking a purposeful whiff of the air she leaves behind. The other lady looks like a toadstool. Her husband can keep her for all I care. 

But because of my April Fool's Day gloom, I was drinking much earlier than normal and privy to a new life of the bar and all its diurnal inhabitants that I previously knew not. I sat their like a scientist studying this unnatural habitat. Everything was so strange bathed in sunlight which poured in copiously from the open blinds I never knew to have any purpose. Rays of dust that were suspended in the sunlit air streamed like golden celestial banners. It was as though I could reach out and grab them, pull them down and put them in my pocket. Everything seemed naked, with the unfortunate exception of Alyssa, goddess of grace, who was too munificently clothed. 

When her chubby husband left with the other fellow, I looked at her again against my better judgment. Damn the consequences. I felt like a pirate hoisting the black, she on my starboard within cannon range. But even if she were Medusa and I was to turn to stone, I could not resist looking. Not today, or tonight, or whatever the hell it was. My eyes were drawn against my will as though by some curious, irrepressible, undefined human magnetism. I overlooked the expensive wedding ring on her finger I could never afford. Something I hoped would be gone one day when I saw her until the hope of her failed marriage seemed far too rapacious for me in my loving and genuine desire, despite my newfound piracy. I do adore her, but my infatuation is innocent, albeit fanciful and romantic the way old TV dramas are romantic for 30 minutes weekly and between commercials for laundry detergent and douches with pretty names. Outside of the bar she played in my mind in reruns. Many times, I thought of going to the bank where she worked and opening an account, but I had no interest in being humiliated or being a homewrecker. Besides, I didn't want her to know my checking account balance. 

Alyssa is to me the way the cute barmaid who is working her way through college is to some of the other regulars who I see look at her like she is a lambchop. A forbidden fruit. I have no delusions of attaining her. She is merely something to appreciate now and then when the stars align and she is here and I am here and everything is right in the universe and just where it belongs, just for a moment. Something to dream of which helps me get by in this ever-maddening and dreary nonsensical world. To me there is not a more beautiful woman in existence and if I were Brad Pitt or some rich handsome fellow, I would want no other and I would pursue her to the ends of the Earth. Husband expulsed. 

Yet, for every smile and accidental glance exchanged, I have never spoken to her. Not once. Not to say excuse me, or to ask her to pass the napkin dispenser. Not to say hello, or goodbye, or Merry Christmas. Nothing. Beer doesn't afford me the courage it does others, or the lack of good sense, and she is married, so it is pointless. What would come of it besides embarrassment and grief? It would only be drama and sin if I succeeded, or rejection and sorrow if I failed. And rejection I had already in abundance and despite what they say, it isn't something that one becomes accustomed to so that you are numb to it thenceforth. I had bars and bars of rejection stowed in me the way they say gold is stowed in Fort Knox. I was a billionaire of rejection.  

It wasn't only April Fool's Day. It was Good Friday, as well, marked accordingly on all those calendars you get at banks or loan companies or hardware stores. I am not sure how often the two coincide. Some morning radio show probably talked about it as though it were something fantastic. Like they do when Halloween falls on Friday the 13th, a departure from their usual boring news of burglaries and drug overdoses and meaningless sports that become increasingly less relevant to me as I get older. For all I know, it might be the first time Good Friday and April Fool's Day ever fell on the same day. It might be as rare as Halley's Comet, or a blue moon, or me getting a date with someone with a pulse. I must explain that I work in a morgue. I see dead people everyday and sometimes we talk. They are good listeners. People who know what I do for a living often look at me glumly. Like I am the Grim Reaper or that I carry death like a disease. 

I didn't know it was Good Friday until some loudmouth Catholics came in and ordered fish as though that would ingratiate them to God. Them giving up cheeseburgers for a day or two. It made me think of my ex-ex-ex who was Catholic and who smelled faintly like tilapia some days and other days as though she had an aquarium inside her. They made mention of church and that weeping Mother Mary in Mexico. They said she was probably crying for the kids on the border, or for all the people who died of coronavirus, or for black guys killed by cops, but I didn't think so. Maybe she cried for aborted babies or every time I saw a hooker because I needed someone with a pulse, just once in a while. I didn't say anything to them. I let them eat their fish and absolve themselves of the sins of their forefathers and brethren who used to kill people like cats kill mice, sometimes just for shits and giggles. But I wanted to admonish them for Pope Gregory who killed all the cats and thus, in effect, who fathered the Black Death. Maybe I will if I get a little more drunk and they're still around to hear about it after my bit about midgets.  

Good Friday is a strange holiday to me. I never thought much of it, though I have always been a Christian so it should be of monumental importance to me. I know it is the day Christ was crucified by the Jews and the Romans. I used to watch a reenactment of it at church when I was a kid. Mom didn't make us go to church other than on Easter and on Christmas Eve, or when dad came home smelling like booze and tilapia so she'd send us to Sunday school in hopes to curtail his natural influence, so it was a strange stuffy place for me even without the whole crucifixion show. It smelled weird. The lights were always dim. People were strange and acted as though their assholes were stuffed with popsicles. They whispered as though God were listening and he only liked soft voices. It smelled like a whorehouse with all the cologne and perfume.

But we would all be sitting in this large auditorium and the doors would swing open and in would walk some confused donkey and some noisy Roman soldiers and a mixed crowd of peasants who were either wailing or cheering like it was a Harvard-Yale game. Then Jesus would come in, toting that giant t of his. That is what I called it back then. A "t." My mom said it was "The Cross" in such a way that I felt calling it a "t" was tantamount to juvenile blasphemy. She said it was the burden of all our sins on one man and I didn't know what she meant, but it stuck something like a hard candy in my throat and I choked on it which is what I believe she wanted me to do all along. To choke on it. Some people believe you ought to have an uncomfortable reverence for God and religion. Comfort isn't allowed, just as pleasure or creative thought once wasn't. Religion ought to be painful, or at least as displeasing as a wool sweater is on raw nipples with no undershirt. 

But faking anguish like nobody's business, or like my little brother faked stomach aches so he didn't have to eat his vegetables, Jesus without any shoes on his feet, ambled down the aisle like hundreds of brides and grooms over time came down the aisle and the Romans yelled at him and the Jews hissed and the donkey brayed and the peasants hollered and hooted and wailed and up on the stage he went behind the place where the preacher always rambled on or baptized babies and they pretended to nail him to the cross and then they strung him up and hoisted him into the air and he looked out at all of us there in the audience as though he could see our sins in our eyes which made me uncomfortable. And they passed the collection plate around and people dropped dollars into the dish while he hung there. For us. For me.  

He muttered a few things and some people cried at his feet and then, very dramatically, he hung his head and died and a spotlight shined down from the ceiling on his head. That's how I remember it. Year after year. I never complained about going. I never minded it. It was bizarre to me. Like watching zoo animals have sex. I remember when I was a kid I wondered what the Easter Bunny had to do with all this. Where do eggs come into the picture. For a couple years I thought maybe he would come out and have a part in it. Maybe he would reveal himself as Pontius Pilate. Or maybe he'd be in the lobby where the little kids could sit on his lap and have their picture taken on the way out for a donation to Jesus Christ Inc. Ten bucks per child for one blurry Polaroid picture.

I don't really understand the Easter Bunny at all. It doesn't get any easier as I get older as I once thought it would. Why you sit on his lap to begin with. You don't ask him for anything like you do Santa. He never talks. It's just an awkward moment of nothing until the camera snaps and you hop off and run away as fast as you can hoping never to see the terrifying thing ever again, remembering the feel of his fake fur on your sweaty palms. At least, that is how it was for me. I never liked the vinegary smell of colored eggs or the feel of Easter grass or those cheap plastic eggs that would crack and that flimsy twig basket. I always hated Easter because my mom baked a ham and I thought ham was the worst food in the world. Then I learned it came from a pig and I couldn't look at it without imagining that pig alive and well, living a happy life. Loving and believing that the people who fed him loved him as well. What must he have been thinking when he was murdered like Christ for our sins. That of gluttony with the final indignity of being cooked wearing a pineapple, robed in it's juice.  

I think too deeply sometimes. Or, at least, I think too much. I've been told so. Sometimes it comes in the form of an accusation. Other times it is an observation, welcomed or otherwise. My imagination is vivid and wild and it bursts like Bengal fire against the blackest of nights, especially in dreams. But I don't have to be sleeping to host abstract thoughts. Sometimes in the morgue at night, I am wide awake and my mind lights up like wildfire. The things I think of when I am awake are just as fantastic and grandiose, though they are tempered by my conscious self the way a lion is tempered by a lion tamer and his whip. I was amid one such thought, something about a new social media app I could create to rival Facebook who is becoming increasingly authoritarian and gay. Yes, gay as a pejorative. I would call it Parley (not to be confused with Parler) and it would have a pirate logo (black background with a white-bearded pirate). Or I thought of inventing a dog toilet and becoming an obscene billionaire, when he walked in. 

He was wearing black Chuck Taylor's which was odd because he wore a fancy gray slim suit with a thin black necktie. It looked like one of those sixties retro suits they sell at high-end men's shops in the fancy malls. He was neat and tidy. Well-groomed. He made me feel like a slouch in my black t-shirt, ripped jeans and unzipped boots. But despite his sophisticated look, he wasn't wearing a mask and everyone was required to wear a mask in the bar because the TV says everyone will die if we don't. Or at least someone's grandma will die and your pigheaded obstinacy will be the reason for it.

The bartender got all frazzled and barked, "Sir, sir!" in anticipation of an argument and handed the stranger one of those cheap masks that can't possibly do any good to wear and informed him of the bar's strict policy and the governor's mandate and so on and so forth. And when the stranger took the mask and put it on, he sat down beside me and was allowed to take it off. Bar policy says when you stand you wear it, but when you sit you don't. Somehow that is effective in combatting the deadly virus. To save us all from dying. When you go to the restroom you must wear it, but inside the restroom when you're dropping bombs or painting the porcelain, sitting or standing, you're free to do what you want because it is literally as big as a broom closet and barely accomodates one. It's like an airplane toilet with paneling. It always smells like piss. 

The man was cordial and didn't bristle about the mask mandate as others sometimes do. It was obvious that he wasn't an asshole. He politely did as he was asked and the apprehensive bartender relaxed and was grateful he wasn't called a communist or a fag or any of the other slurs he has heard over the past year. The man ordered a beer and he looked over at me and smiled and I thought he looked familiar, but at some point in the evening, everyone looks familiar, so I shrugged it off. He looked up at the TV and watched the game and drank his beer and ordered a pizza. I was about to order when he invited me to share his because he wouldn't eat all of it, he confessed. And since he ordered it the way I like it, with cheese, onion and banana peppers, cooked crispy, I agreed and I bought him another beer for the gesture and we got along well. I suppose this is how friends are made in the natural world of friend-making, but I don't have many friends. Just a few guys I grew up with and the other regulars who would probably not refer to me as a friend. I'm more generous with the term than most, I suppose. 

He introduced himself as Jesus. I was distracted because Alyssa looked down the bar and we were caught in one of those moments when we both looked at each other at exactly the same time and she smiled and I smiled as Jesus said his name was Jesus. And I thought of the Mother Mary statue in Mexico crying bloody tears and how someone was saying that it was probably the result of centuries of oxidation and the tears were actually rust, not blood. "Science," they balked snobbishly. Then I remembered when I was kid I made toast with rye bread and when the bread came out of the toaster I saw Jesus' face staring back at me and I was lost in a moment. His face looked a little like the image on the Shroud of Turin. I showed it to my dad who laughed at me and said the face looked like Paul Newman and we should not waste good bread. When I left the room to get my camera, he buttered and ate it before I could show anyone or take a polaroid picture for show-and-tell at school the next day. 

I've never met anyone named Jesus before. I met a few Joses and a couple people named Jesus, pronounced "Hay-Seuss," but no straight-up Jesus. He had short-styled hair and a short trimmed beard which threw me for a loop because I always thought he'd have long hair and a wild beard, but I suppose that was ignorant of me to assume. He had every right to get new clothes at one of those fancy stores and to go to Sports Clips like the rest of us and get his hair trimmed and to buy a razor and shave if he wanted to. Who am I to tell him different? 

When he took off his big sunglasses, he had bright blue eyes and a warm smile. He was immediately the most handsome man in the bar and I hoped I did not look less in his shadow the way Alyssa's friend looked like a toadstool in hers. Maybe she would overlook me for him and I would be one of those guys whose love life was ruined by a virtuous woman's overzealous adoration of Jesus Christ. I read stories like that before in some kooky magazine. Despite his appearance being contrary to my expectations, I didn't have to ask him if he was "The" Jesus. There was something in me that already knew that he was. 

As a kid I was always skeptical of the guy who they crucified on Easter. That glee-club phony. I always knew he was some narcissist whose ego goaded him into playing Jesus in the Easter special. That guy with a fake beard and a plastic crown on his head that didn't even hurt. All that fake blood and the whimperings and snivelings of a bad actor who heralds himself as an underappreciated "thespian" who once played in a community theater production of "Harvey." You know the type. The kind with a unnaturally large bean-shaped head and ugly kids who talks too loud and laughs all the time and smiles for no reason. The kind everyone wishes that aliens would come to Earth and annihilate with a laser gun just like in the movies until there is nothing left of him besides a crispy pile of black ash. But even still, somewhere in those ashes, you know he's still smiling like an idiot. You just know it. 

But then they put him in the cardboard tomb and he comes out as though he were Punxatawney Phil, smiling like it was to be an early spring or like he won the Powerball Lottery. And there he'd be in the parlor afterwards, eating cookies and drinking juice in little paper Dixie cups like he was Jesus still, at the after-party, basking in his temporary glory, the shine rapidly losing its luster. Talking to little old ladies and patting the heads of bored kids who'd rather see a mute deranged Easter Bunny than this second-rate community theater Jesus with ketchup smeared all over his absurd face. 

But this guy beside me was not an Easter Jesus. He was not the same. He was the genuine article. I knew it before I saw his hand on the beer mug. I snuck a peak, though I remember someone said it is better to have faith than it is to seek proof, but my eyes wandered of their own volition. So even though I was sure and ready to take it on faith, I spied out of the corner of my little eye the hole in his right hand which looked like a fishbowl full of beer. It could be a tattoo, the skeptical me argued. But I knew it wasn't. I knew he was Jesus. 

Our pizza arrived and I passed him a plate and we divvied up slices and I ordered us another round of beers. I didn't know what to say to him. I waited for him to say something to me. To state his purpose for coming as though he had to. Like aliens would seemingly have to state their business when they land on Earth. Or anyone foreign when they go into another country. Of all the places in the world to be, Ohio isn't a destination with incredible draw so I was baffled as to how we could have landed the messiah. I wanted to ask him a million things. I wanted to order a glass of water and ask him to turn it into wine. I wanted him to do something remarkable. To heal someone. Raise the dead. Walk on water. But it was unfair of me to ask anything of him for all that he has already done. To treat him as one might some casual street performer. So I exhaled and asked nothing of him at all. 

I can remember this: I once said if I could have a beer with anyone who ever lived it would be with Jesus. It was a discussion here in this very bar a year or so ago, possibly last Good Friday because I always seem to be drinking on Good Friday like people eat turkey on Thanksgiving or pineapple-glazed ham on Easter. Everyone laughed. Then they said they would choose some musician, or a pretty actress, or Babe Ruth. But I said Jesus and I meant it. For all the cheapening and the manipulating others have done in his name, for all the doubting and the ridiculing that has been waged against him by vainglorious elitists on their godless perches, I've never been one of them. Those disgruntled NPR nerds. The deranged Scientologists. The Wiccans who smell like patchouli and sweat and eat tree bark. The agnostics. I've always believed in him, and I suppose he knows that. Maybe that's what this is all about. 

Still, maybe I was dreaming. Maybe I had drank so much since four that I had already gone home to take a shit and I passed out on the toilet and this all was a dream on cold tile. I have done so before. Passed out in the bathroom, I mean. Baptized myself in toilet water because I was drunk, sick and thirsty. There is a reason I have a pillow in the sink cabinet and bottles of water to assuage the inevitable thirst from alcohol dehydration. But there he sat on the stool denying my audacious claim to be in the theater production of a dream gone awry. There he was, smiling, watching the ballgame without a care in the world. And then he awoke me from my contemplation. 

"You're not dreaming. I am Jesus. You have it right. Your rants on Facebook. About abortion. You cannot support abortion and be of God. It is evil. But that isn't why I came. I am here to tell you that you should find a good woman and marry her."

"Thanks. And easier said than done."

He smiled. "Yes. It is. But you have changed, haven't you? For the better, I mean. I can see you," he smiled looking at me playfully through that hole in his hand. Although it was sort of creepy, I was surprised and relieved by his sense of humor. By his frequent smile which calmed me as effectively as Alyssa's face excited me.  

"Here I am. Not a care in the world. Having a beer, eating a pizza, and watching a ballgame. I went fishing earlier today. Didn't catch a thing. It didn't matter, though. It's just a good feeling. People have been waiting for me to come back. Fact is, I come back all the time. Sometimes I sit in the stands at Fenway Park. Sometimes I'm homeless or I work at a carnival or in a bowling alley or a food truck. Sometimes I just watch the sunset over Yosemite. Sometimes I go to Tahiti. It is just that people don't often notice or believe when they see me."

"You're on Facebook?"

"Sure, I'm on Facebook," he replied. "I'm everywhere. I never comment or like anything. But I observe. I always observe. I have around 8 billion eyes. One for each of you." 

I never imagined Jesus would drink beer. I never imagined he would eat pizza. And when he said he had to piss, well, I never imagined that he would have to piss. When he left his seat without his mask, the persnickety bartender yelled at him and ordered him to put it on. The "please" that followed was delivered through gnashed teeth and with an air of moral superiority or preemptive scorn for the indignant shrug or blowback that he was sure he would get. But Jesus didn't give the bartender any grief unlike many of the townsfolk who didn't believe in invisible things that could kill them just as atheists don't believe in invisible Gods or in any intelligence or authority beyond man and man's comprehension, or that there is a consequence for their acts on Earth in another place they cannot see or define. Instead, Jesus simply made the bartender a generous offer. 

"Sir, I will purify the air by inhaling and exhaling so that no one in this establishment ever gets coronavirus if you would like. My breath will be your breath. I will breathe immunity into the lungs of everyone here."

The bartender looked at Jesus beguiled and in utter disbelief, perceiving what he said as a threat. It was as though Jesus had threatened the place with chemical warfare. To inhale and exhale? Without a mask? To exchange air? 

For a moment, I expected there to be a kerfuffle. But I interjected on Jesus' behalf, assuring the bartender that he was, in fact, Jesus of Nazareth, and that he could do as he promised. But I slurred part of it, distracted by Alyssa who was smiling at the scene, so my testament lost credibility. It was Jesus on rye all over again and my dad was going to eat the toast when I left the room. 

"Jesus?!" the bartender laughed. "On Good Friday, no less? Well, excuse me, King of Kings," he mocked. "But you don't even look like Jesus! You could have wore a robe, at least. Had a beard. Something. Put your mask on or leave. It's your choice - Rabbi." 

So Jesus' offer to immunize the entire bar was declined by the skeptical bartender who kept a keen eye on Jesus. Maybe he thought it was an April Fool's gag. Or maybe he thought he was just one of those church Jesus's who get crucified once a year and then go back to their ordinary boring lives of mowing grass and sorting tupperware. One who didn't want to let it go. One who wanted to go on being Jesus, but never be crucified for real. To be let down from Calvary when the curtain closed for happy hour at Applebee's. 

The bartender got in on the gag when Jesus came out of the bathroom. He told him he better go outside, his donkey was double-parked. The people at the bar laughed and Jesus, who proved to be a good sport, smiled and raised his hand in appreciation of the joke. I put my hands over my face, embarrassed for all of humanity. Then he came back, humbly, and sat down and drank his beer. 

"Yes. That was me on rye all those years ago," he admitted. "I wanted to see if you were paying attention. If you believed and if I could count on you." He smiled and I smiled. Then he said no more of it. Several hours passed and Jesus was showing no signs of getting drunk, but I was barely hanging on. I kept looking down at Alyssa who was chatting with her friend. Occasionally, her eyes would find me and I was there waiting for her. Mingling. Then I figured Jesus might notice me looking and accuse me of coveting thy neighbor's wife, which I was pretty sure went against one of the Ten Commandments and Charleston Heston came down from my cerebral cortex purveying two heavy stone tablets which would later become the Arc of the Covenant that Indiana Jones would find sometime in my childhood. But Jesus patted me on the back and encouraged me, instead.  

"You're a man of faith, Ben. These others, they are not. They only believe in science, though they don't understand the frailty of it. The science of whoever they choose to listen to moreso than science that welcomes scrutiny. Science is a human conception and subject to human interpretation and perception and limited to their limited understanding. Even their facts are based on consensuses rather than absolutes. The only absolute is God." 

"What is God?" I asked like some dope-smoking college kid. 

"God is love. That's all there is." He paused and looked me over. I was swimming not yet drowning on understanding, though there is little that separates the two. Perhaps, he felt sympathy for me. Of course he did. He is the most compassionate person to ever live. He is love personified. 

"What is it that you would like, Ben? A million dollars? A new car? A nicer home? What on Earth would make you happy? Unlike the Easter Bunny, I can give you anything you want. Wait," he stopped himself. "Don't answer. I can read your mind, you know. You don't have to answer." He again looked at me through the hole in his hand like it was an oracle on a ouija board. 

Oh, shit, I thought. He can read minds. He must have known what I was thinking about Alyssa all this time. Every unsavory thought worming through my dirty head. Not that they were all unsavory. There were plenty of wholesome thoughts in there. There was a wedding in there. The birth of a kid or two. Dinners. Travels. Beaches. The theater. Sharing a bottle of wine on the front porch. Growing old together. I looked at Jesus and smiled. World peace, I thought. 

He smiled and exhaled. "Why don't you just go talk to her?"

"She's married!" I whispered loudly. "And I'm drunk." 

Jesus put his holy hand on my head and closed his eyes. In a few seconds, I was no longer so drunk and it was as though I had no more than two. It would be a silly thing to ask, how did you do that, being that he is Jesus, but reactively that is what I said. And he grinned at me and gave me another reassuring pat on the back. He could have given me the nerve to go talk to her. Given me the perfect thing to say to her that she couldn't refuse, but he didn't. It was all up to me. 

"Isn't there some religious law against coveting someone's wife? Aren't you encouraging me to perpetrate adultery?"

"Talking is not adultery. Coveting is a matter of perspective. I wouldn't say you're coveting at all. I'd say you're admiring. Like her husband doesn't. Her husband barely knows she's alive, that's why she drinks as much as she does. She doesn't want to work in a bank, Ben. She wants to be a writer. That's why she looks back when you look at her. You are what she hasn't. A story she hasn't yet wrote. Her husband would rather be a bull rider in the gay rodeo. Wanted to be one all his life. He wants to live on a cattle ranch in Montana. Marry another man who would like that sort of cowboy lifestyle. Alyssa isn't that person. She is a vegetarian who loves animals better than people. She likes to read books. Romantic short stories, mostly. She is a writer."

"I am a writer, too!" Of course he knew that. I couldn't help but to exclaim it. "But why did they get married?"

"I would say God only knows, but He doesn't. People get married who shouldn't get married. It happens all the time. Only they know why. They settle or they have a kid, or they think, well, why not? Maybe this is as good as it gets." 

I was staring at her. Recklessly staring. But still I couldn't approach her. Not even with Jesus' consent and the knowledge that her husband was gay with dreams of riding rodeo bulls and other like-minded cowboys. Regardless of the lack of happiness in their marriage, I was no homewrecker. And I knew nothing good would come of me talking to her because it had an inevitable and very determinable end. If she adored me as much as I adored her, I would be putting her in a difficult position of chosing between the husband she didn't love but was obligated to, and the stranger who she did but who she owed nothing. Perhaps, if their marriage collapsed naturally, I wouldn't be so conflicted. But I knew I ought not be the cause so I smiled at Jesus and thanked him for the company because it felt as though it were time to go. 

He didn't look like I thought he would, I considered again. Maybe I thought he would look like one of those 15th century Spanish oil paintings, or like something Da Vinci did, or like a figure on a stained-glass window, or like that guy in all the Sunday school coloring pictures we colored as kids. He didn't look like the unflattering rube Popular Mechanics once hypothesized he would look like. A Middle-Eastern Barney Rubble. Nor did he look like Osama Bin Laden or the guy who hung on our living room wall who looked like he could be in The Statler Brothers. He looked like Paul Newman in 1963. In fact, in retrospect, I think he was Paul Newman from 1963. But I knew without him telling me that he looks different to everyone. To every single person who imagines him or envisions him, to even the disciples who followed him, he looked different to each one. And no one is wrong. 

He said he had to be going and I asked him if he needed a ride to wherever and he looked at me and grinned as though to say he had it covered. I paid our tab and he smiled at the bartender who scrutinized him as he put on his mask to walk ten feet out the door. 

When we walked outside, the warm air swallowed us whole and the night was one of those perfect early-spring nights. Warm and insect-free. Too early for the sweltering but inevitable heat of June that lingers and makes the sewers brew and stink and everything feel sticky. The world smells clean in spring, almost as though it is new and it hadn't ever been here before. Like it was just created. Just built. And we were all stirred up from fresh sand. 

There were so many questions I wanted to ask him I realized then much too late. Most of which was about right and wrong. Compromising our morals and ethics to appear compassionate versus changing and being hypocritical. I wanted to know if we got it right. Or who gets it right. Who should we follow. I wanted to know if I was forgiven for the hookers, mostly. For the sex. The oodles and oodles of sex. For spoonful after spoonful of adultery in the cup of my sinful life. It was a sin, after all, right there on one of Moses' two tablets. I wanted to know if I was forgiven for everything wrong and if he took offense to the crude things I wrote or said which were simply expressed thoughts manifested from repressed desires or harmless curiosities or dark humor. Things I should say to a therapist. I wanted to know if some sins were worse than others. I wanted to know if there was a lake of fire. 

He put his hand on my shoulder and smiled. "You have all the answers already. Go home and be happy. It's Good Friday, after all."

With that he walked through the parking lot and got on a black Triumph scrambler. It started with a growl and he pulled out of the gravel lot, kicking up a few rocks. He didn't wear a helmet. I suppose, he needn't, just as he needn't wear a mask. I suppose he was impervious to all hazards of life, after all, he was Jesus and he had endured crucifixion and two thousand years of dolts criticizing and denying him. He waved goodbye as he pulled out and turned left onto Main Street and disappeared in a swath of lights from a gas station and a Dairy Queen and into the crease of a clean black night. His taillight faded fast in the distance. I rubbed my face and laughed to myself. Of all things, I thought pensively. Of all things. Perhaps someone put something in my beer and it was all a hallucination. They say it happens all the time. Usually, to pretty girls. 

I caught a glimpse of Alyssa in the bar through a window and I sighed. She was chatting with her toadstool friend still, though she had her credit card out to pay the bill. What could they possibly be talking so much about? Hours and hours. Her arms were flailing as she spoke. I wish I had the right words to say to her. That which wouldn't constitute trespassing upon her marriage. But I gave up and went home. When I was walking home, being I lived within one block of the bar, I saw a rabbit on someone's lawn. It stopped when I stopped and seemed to look at me as I looked at it. It was as though it had a lot to say to me. I wonder how it felt about the Easter Bunny. Or about Jesus. I wonder how it felt about Easter or pineapple on ham or Mother Mary crying bloody tears in Mexico. It didn't say anything at all. 

I slept like a baby with the TV on in the background. Someone was talking about coronavirus. They said we were all going to die if we didn't wear masks or get our vaccines or do this or that. It's science, they said. They rolled out inflated death tolls. They said it began in a Chinese wet market where they don't practice safe or hygenic slaughtering, if that is such a thing. It could have come from a dog fart for all I knew. It didn't matter to me. I didn't care much about it. Church services were cancelled last year in many churches across the country. All I could think about were all those terrible actors who couldn't be Jesus for a year. Then I dreamt about Paul Newman. He was making spaghetti. He was wearing a crown of thorns and a robe watching the noodles cook, stirring the pot gently with a wood spoon. He was eating boiled eggs. He was nursing a terrible hangover. He was my dad, making love to a toaster. 

"He has risen!" she grinned as I opened my eyes and rubbed my stubbly face. It was Alyssa. I was immediately confounded. I was in my bed. Alyssa was in my bed. I don't remember going back in after Jesus left and talking to her. But in the moment, I supposed I had. "Get up! We're going to be late for church! Hoppity! Hop! Hop! Hop!"

She smiled and said she was going downstairs to make us breakfast. If it was a dream, I was all in. I was going for it. I got up and got dressed. I brushed my teeth and combed my hair. I didn't take a shower for fear it might wake me up. 

I ate breakfast with Alyssa, my wife of twenty years. There were pictures of two kids on the wall who were in college and who looked like us. Our kids. There was a gold completely restored 75 Trans Am with black vinyl interior in the driveway. I asked the Easter Bunny for that same car one year a long time ago. As I was eating my eggs and toast, somewhere in Montana Alyssa's first husband she never met was on the back of a bucking bronco happily on his way to Brokeback Mountain. God is good, I smiled. God is very, very good. 

We took the Trans Am to church. I spun out of the driveway like I used to do as a kid on a bigwheel. It was warm and the T-tops were out. I turned up the radio and sang along to the perfect song that I am sure someone greater than me had a hand in orchestrating. The morning sun was warm and comforting. It felt brand-new.

"Honey, do you think Jesus would be okay for us jamming Kiss on the way to Easter service?" Alyssa asked as Paul sung, "I Was Made For Loving You."

"Yes, babe. I am quite sure of it." I smiled at my beautiful wife and could hardly stop looking over at her the way I did for so long when we were strangers in a bar. I gave her a kiss at the next stoplight and then I turned up the music the the sound of drums and electric whips and when the light turned green, I peeled out. 

I have no idea what happened yesterday. Saturday. It is gone from my memory as though I never lived it at all. I suppose I slept it away.  I suppose that was the day when Jesus made all this possible. I decided not to question it. Nor to ever mention it to anyone. Who would believe me anyway? I hardly believe it myself. 

Despite coronavirus, the church was full. People wore masks. They crucified Christ as they did every Easter. He wore a mask, too, which was funny to me. People surely ate ham and bought lilies. 

When it was over, the preacher gave the account of Jesus being resurrected. He spoke of uncertainty and doubt and said we are all waiting on him to come back and what will happen when he does, never knowing that it happens all the time. And somewhere in Mexico, Mother Mary cries tears of blood for somebody or something somewhere, or maybe for no reason at all. What do I care why? I have Alyssa. I have my wife. And I know Jesus.