Bob Shakespeare

Lucifer's True History of Everything

Apr 29, 08 11:45 AM

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***

Two weeks later, we're sitting under a beach umbrella at the Omni in Corpus Christi, Texas. Beelzebub brings it up again. He's been busy: Beelzebub has canvassed the white page directories of every city, town, and backwater in all of North America for a list of "sinners from whom Beelzebub shall cast out Beelzebub."

I can already tell that this will be another one of his stupid practical jokes to play on God. "Count me out," I say.

"Let's hear it," says Belial.

"Take a look!" says Bubba. He slaps a paper into the sand. It is a hand-written directory of fifteen telephone listings, same first and last name, but different cities and phone numbers.

Beelzebub chuckles. He thinks that the document in the sand is pretty funny. I take one look and I can see that it's pretty juvenile.

Here is what Bubba has done: He has gone and compiled a directory of every North American White Page listing under the name, "Harry Dick."

"No, Bubba," I said. "The answer’s No."

"Don't argue with me, Lou, you're in."

"Out."

"In."

When Beelzebub resolves to ensnare me in one of his little pranks, he never leaves me alone until I play along. There was no gainsaying him.

"Here's the plan," he said. "For six weeks, we take a moratorium on tempting people to sin..."

Belial, who has never been a hard worker, just yawned and checked his fingernails. "We won't be missed, you know," he said. "They sin more often without our suggestions. It is the Lord's way of trying to make us three feel as if our life is futile and without – "

"Zip it!" said Beelzebub. (When Beelzebub is working on a new scheme, no one else is allowed to speak.) Bubba unveils his plan: "We are going to be Christian evangelists," he said. "Missionaries!"

BELIAL: Like hell we are.

BEELZEBUB: Shut up and listen. You're gonna love this. We three are gonna make a born-again Christian out of every Harry Dick in America.

Okay, Belial laughs at that. I am not yet amused.

BELIAL (mulling this over): Do you realize how these fifteen men must have suffered? [Here, for emphasis, he slapped the paper with the back of his hand] Can you imagine what these men went through in middle school alone? What "Dick" parents would name their manchild "Harry"?

BEELZEBUB: Exactly: Why did my parents do this to me? and: Why did God let them? They're hurting, everyone of these guys is hurting inside. They're bearing a load, they've got baggage, they need someone to talk to. So we lead –

BELIAL (not without sympathy). "I once knew a Harry Wiener. In St. Louis. Very unlucky guy. None of the girls ever wanted to date a Harry Wiener. None of the guys wanted to play with a Harry Wiener. No employer wanted to hire a Harry Wiener. So finally, he started his own used car dealership. But no one wanted to buy a car from a Harry Wiener. Poor Harry ended up becoming a priest. And it's a shame, too, because Harry was not, by nature, a religious man.

BEELZEBUB: Are you done? Good. So we lead at least twelve of these fifteen guys –

BELIAL: You, Bubba, you! Not: "we."

BEELZEBUB: So we lead these guys to the Lord, and –

BELIAL: Bubba, you're dreaming, it will never work.

BEELZEBUB: Shut up and listen. And after we get them to become born again, we help them start up a men's club, a mutual support group, called "Harry Dicks for Christ." Next, we –

BELIAL: Get out of my life.

ME: Mine, too.

Beelzebub, ignoring our objections, passed out our homework. Bubba claimed sole dibs on the six Harry Dicks living south of Mason-Dixon. That way, he wouldn't need to leave Texas (as chance would have it, there are more Harry Dicks in Texas than in any other state). Belial was assigned to the East Coast. I was given contact info for the four Harry Dicks between Denver and San Diego.

And that is how I ended up at Billy Graham's 1963 Greater Los Angeles Crusade beside my new friend, Harry Dick. He was the last of my four candidates. One of the Harry Dicks on my list was a hard-assed military man, a colonel in the Fifth Infantry. I was afraid to mess with him. Another was 82 years old, seven years into Alzheimer's, and well beyond salvation. The third turned out to be a fake – a lonely guy over in Bakersfield who had used a pseudonymous white page listing in hopes that maybe someone would call. The fourth was just a kid: Harry E. Dick of Garden Grove, thirty miles south of L.A. He was my guy.

– L.

(Tomorrow: meet my friend, Harry!)

Posted by Lucifer at 11:45 AM

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Apr 29, 08 11:52 AM

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***

Harry, 19, worked as a welder for a Meinecke car care shop. He could talk about only two subjects: professional sports and sexually transmitted diseases. He loved pro sports. He hated the thought of contracting an STD.

Harry as a kid had attended Sunday School for almost ten years, but he had nothing to show for it. You could ask him: What's the difference between Jesus and Joshua? between Moses and Noah? between a lawyer and a catfish? between the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene? – and he would have no clue. It was the last one of those educational disabilities that worried him: for the only thing Harry retained from his childhood religious training was a severe STD-phobia. Newspaper clippings about venereal disease were held with magnets to his refrigerator – and quite unnecessarily so, because Harry knew no girls and never went out. Yet he was obsessed with thoughts of catching crabs, gonorrhea, hepatitis, syphilis. He said he would lie awake nights, fearing a herpes attack. He got a blood test every two weeks and checked himself daily for genital warts. He said that a guy these days cannot be over-careful. Clearly, he suffered from some kind of psychological syndrome – displaced anxiety over his name, perhaps. Otherwise, he seemed perfectly healthy. Just stupid.

Anyway, Harry was trying to sell his nearly new 1963 Grand Prix 389 cid V8 two-barrel with automatic transmission. Which he could not afford. He had fallen behind on his payments. The car was about to be repossessed by his bank. That was my hook. I pretended to be interested in his Grand Prix.

It was a nice car, but why automatic? Harry said he actually preferred to drive a stick, but when he bought his car from Anaheim Hills Pontiac, he discovered "a negative omen" with respect to his first choice, a burgundy 4-speed 421 four-barrel in the dealer's showroom. The sticker, on the third line down, stated "TRANSMISSION: STD." Harry said he knows you cannot get infected by a car, but it was like a warning from God.

I hung out with Harry, off and on, for a week. We watched baseball and football on the telly (the Dodgers went on to a four-game sweep over the Yankees in the World Series that year). We drank beer. Meanwhile, I kept a copy of the "Four Steps to Peace With God" in my jeans pocket, and watched for just the right moment to introduce Harry to the Lord. But when I tried to discuss personal salvation, Harry was thick as a brick. He just said, "When you're dead, you're dead. That don't really bother me. I just don't want to die of tertiary syphilis."

After a while, I came to view Harry's salvation as a challenge. I gave myself another ten days.

– L.

(Tomorrow: can this man be saved?)