PROLOG

In which I explain how I got to be in this predicament

 

When I was born, on the first anniversary of Albert Einstein’s death, I came out saying something stupid and I’ll be damned if I can remember what it was, but the doctors and nurses were laughing so hard I squirted out of their hands like a watermelon seed and fell right on my head.

Then what happened next was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me, because right there on the ceiling where I was floating around watching the doctor pick my limp body up off the floor, there was a little red-haired demon baby floating around and he said to me, “Quick, jump back in!”  And I did what he said, I jumped back into my body and that demon jumped right in with me, explaining that I was going to need his help if I ever wanted anything to go my way, because I was the most unlucky guy he’d ever met.  So we popped in together and became a team.

The doctor picked me up and brushed me off and said I was fine, and woke up my mother who was stoned on doctor drugs and showed her my pecker and said I was a boy.  My mother mumbled something about how she finally did something right, then rolled her eyes back in her head and went back to sleep.

The nurses washed all the slime and goo off me and took me into a room with a bunch of other babies and plopped me into a plastic thing that looked like an open coffin.  They stuck a bottle of sugar water in my mouth and left me there to dope myself up, and before long I started hallucinating and pretty soon I passed out and went back into the recent past, and had this dream about my last life.

Before I was Maxwell Zdaemon I was this guy named Colford Isaac Newman, and it turns out this demon fellow was with me then too, until my Daddy back then, an evangelist and con man in New York City, killed himself with alcohol, at which time I became so embarrassingly morose that the demon soon grew tired of me and refused to be seen with me.  Having lost my first and only job as a famous—although like my father, alcoholic—child evangelist, the star of my father’s show and the apple of his eye, I decided to start over as a writer and headed for California to write a book called Fifty Years After the Gold Rush, since I had read with great interest how fortunes had been made in the gold mining business, and I fully intended to use the manipulational abilities I had learned as a child evangelist trained under a con artist father to wriggle my way into that business by way of the good graces of the first self-made millionaire I could get to grant me an interview.

On the way out of town I took the compressed air powered trolley which had been puffing around the streets of the city for several years, and as I prepared to step out onto the landing of the Railroad Station that would haul me off to California, I turned to the trolley driver, who was literally weeping into his mustache as he commiserated with a compatriot.  I had been picking up bits and pieces of their conversation; it seems that the air powered trolleys were being taken out of service forever, to make way for what the two men cynically termed “progress.”  They were both quite drunk.

The trolley driver—they were called engineers in those days—looked at me, and I looked back at him.  Well? he said, Are you getting off or not?

I stammered that I had wanted to express my sympathy for his rotten luck at finding his job eliminated.

He replied, Express to the symphony?  How the fuck would I know where you can catch the express to the symphony?  I don’t even work for this company anymore.  This company don’t run on these streets anymore, sonny, you go ask that fine gentleman operating that shiny electric trolley over there if he knows where the express to the symphony might be found, and when you get there, I invite you to shove a tuba up your ass sideways and take a flying fuck at Lake Michigan while you’re at it!

My face reddened and I stepped onto the platform of the train station.

That was the last proper conversation I had with a human being, throughout the rest of my miserable, short—though not short enough—so-called life as Colford Isaac Newman.  As it turned out, the man’s emotional words, prompted by the shutting down of the air powered trolley company he worked for, reverberated in my tormented mind every day for the rest of said aforementioned so-called life, and from then on, every time I tried to open my mouth, I—the once-famous child evangelist—became completely tongue-tied by the greatest stutter of the new century.

The weirdest thing is that, during that silent, lonesome and otherworldly train expedition from the world I knew to the world I had only read about, every time I tried to speak and couldn’t, a red-haired lad who looked uncannily similar to me would appear from behind my left shoulder and finish my sentence for me, and when I tried to look directly at him, he would be gone.  When I finally arrived in Sacramento, the bustling capital city of California only a few dozen miles from the Gold Territories, I watched the train depart the station for San Francisco and to my shock and amazement, the slippery red-haired young man stuck his head out the window and hollered at me: “Good luck, su-su-su-sucker!”

I started in a gold-crazed town called Grass Valley, where I was just about to settle down and try to figure out how to be a writer and interviewer when I couldn’t even talk, when I fell in love with a prostitute and spent most of my money wooing her and the rest of it on booze when she was unavailable.  I thought she was in love with me right back until I ran out of money, at which time I was introduced to her other man friend who said he liked her a lot more than I did, and why didn’t I see if I could find the other end of town and just keep going.

Which I did, being a born coward in that life as well as I am in this one, and on my way into the hills to go find a nice cliff to jump off of, I ran into a burro wandering around carrying a pack on him, and took him for a friend.  I let “Judas” lead the way till we came to a shack where a dead miner was rotting, and after we buried him in the river and washed our hands, we went back to the shack and tidied it up a little in preparation for our suicide which would take place next morning.

So when morning rolled around, me and Judas went on up to the top of the most spectacular cliff we could find, and we looked down.  I edged a little closer, accidentally slipped about an inch-and-a-half, and puked over the edge in utter panic.  That was close enough for that day, and the same thing happened day after day till I finally got real hungry and took the dead miner’s gold to town for some grub. 

Back in our shack, we talked about our suicide plans at great length—it was both relieving and frustrating to me that my stutter disappeared completely when I attempted to communicate with dumb beasts—until we both decided that between the two of us we were too cowardly to jump just yet, and figured it would take about ten years to work up the nerve.  We set a date and made a solemn vow to get even with the world on that day by jumping off that spectacular cliff.

So for the next ten years I lay around feeling sorry for myself and finding just enough gold to keep me and Judas fed.  When the big day finally came, we were heading for that cliff, but Judas had chickened out and wouldn’t budge.  I was pulling on his rope and cussing him when the damn thing slipped off over his head and I fell backwards into a crummy little gully and busted my head wide open on a fairly small rock.

Poor Judas didn’t know what to do, so he turned around and went back to town, and I didn’t see him again.

But I was in some sort of shock or something and didn’t know I was dead, so I cussed Judas for deserting me, and proceeded to make my way down the skinny trail till I got to my spectacular cliff.  There I sat for three days, until I finally got so pissed at myself for being a coward that I hollered, “Good-bye you sa-sa-sa-sack of shit wo-wo-wo-world!” and flung myself over the cliff.

But I’ll be damned if I didn’t just float there, my heart up in my throat, and ever so gently like a feather I just wafted on down till I hit bottom so softly I didn’t even raise a puff of dust. 

This pissed me off worse than anything, so I climbed back up to the top and tried again.  Same thing happened, again and again, till I got tired and went to sleep.  When I woke up again, it had snowed, which was quite a surprise since it was the middle of August, but anything can happen, so I kept jumping off the cliff until I got tired and went to sleep again.  This went on for many years, and each time I slept, I slept longer, and was groggier each time I woke up.  Eventually I more or less didn’t even care anymore, and just kept jumping off the cliff because I didn’t have any other ideas in my head.  This went on for about 46 years.

Then one time I woke up at the bottom of the cliff and was just about to haul my tired ass back up for another shot at it when I saw two pairs of feet, one in worn-out leather sandals and one in fuzzy bedroom slippers.  I jumped up, scared out of my mind, since I hadn’t seen another human being since Judas left.

There stood two of the funniest looking little Jewish dudes you ever saw, grinning at me like devils.  They commenced to telling me their names were Jesus and Einstein.  Jesus I knew about, and sure enough he had some nasty-looking scars on him in all the right places, but this Einstein fellow, I had to just take his word for it.  At first I couldn’t understand what they were saying because they were talking in Yiddish or something, until I figured out I could hear them thinking, then it all began to make sense.

Jesus and Einstein explained that they were in trouble with the Soul Police for stirring up shit on Earth and were being required to return to Earth and clean up the messes they had made with their big ideas.  Einstein said it wasn’t his fault, the government made him do it, and Jesus said he never asked to be born immaculate anyway, and I knew I was in good company with a couple of whiners like myself, so I opened up and started to tell them my whole story.  Halfway through the convoluted forest of stuttered phonemic mishaps, they stopped me and said they knew all about it already and had come here specially to make me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

First they explained to me that I was a ghost and told me how I’d died in that crummy little gully, at which I became despondent and almost suicidal, but then they said I could be born again, and not like my father the evangelist and con artist had used the term, but literally born again as a little baby to live life over as someone else.  But they said the Soul Police were pissed at me for trying to kill myself—and since then I’ve found out they were lying in order to get me to come on over to their way of thinking—but they said the only way I could start over was if I would agree to take on their debts to society for creating Holy Wars, Inquisations, Adam Bums, and other such nonsense.  They said they wanted to go off traveling to some other dalmatian and couldn’t get away unless I would agree to be a living person again and carry out their “comic obligations” for them, whatever those are.  I thought about it for a second and said, OK, what do I have to lose, let’s get going before I figure out what the hell you guys are talking about and change my mind.

So we headed off in this big shiny floating thing that looked like a metal eating plate, and landed on the beach at night in a town called Opononi, New Zealand.  There wasn’t anybody there except a couple screwing in a cave, and after we watched them for awhile, we went down to the water and that swarthy little Jesus fellow picked us up on his back and carried us out on the water till we got to this teeny little island about five feet square.  Me and Einstein got down and here comes this dolphin with a shiny naked red-haired fellow riding on its back, and sure enough if it isn’t my helper, who I had forgot all about!

Well me and my demon said hi, and it was kind of awkward because of the way we had parted, and the demon said he was trying to cheer up the dolphin girl because her family had thrown her out of the family for saying bad words and having an unsociable attitude.  He said she was actually so despondent that she had been trying to mash herself against the rocks and die, but had only managed to bruise and lacerate herself.  So Jesus and Einstein explained to the demon and the dolphin why we were here, and told the dolphin the same crap about suicide being a soul crime or something, at which she hung her head and pouted, and then they said, But wait!  We have a way out for you.

It turns out that what they had in mind was for me and the demon to get re-acquainted from the inside of a dolphin, sort of a period of attitude adjustment and waiting for the stars to line up just right in some sort of really bad way, which they explained would be part of my punishment for the complications that they had brought on the human race and the Planet Earth.  Since my being born under a bad star seemed so important to their scheme, I figured OK, what do I have to lose, and damned if that Jesus fellow didn’t just push me right in the water.

Next thing I know, I’m inside that dolphin so fast I don’t have time to get wet, and the demon pops in right after me, and the dolphin lady’s spirit is nowhere to be seen.  I leaped up out of the water, and there goes Jesus and Einstein hauling ass off into the sky, and I’ve never seen them since. 

A lot of help they were, I’m thinking, and my demon says not to worry about it, because he’s here to help me.  I headed straight for shore, and hung around waiting for dawn, eating slimy little fish and starting to like it.  Then morning came and eventually people started showing up.  I hadn’t seen so many near-naked people together in one place in my whole previous life, and was surprised that I wasn’t trying to get away as fast as I could.  The demon explained that this was because of his presence, him being my better half, and me just being some sort of empty shell without him, so no wonder that I’d spent the last half a century avoiding people, because without the demon element I’d had no appreciation for the human race.

Barely listening to the demon, and actually starting to become him, my curiosity about humans was too strong to withstand, so I swam up as close to shore as I could, and pretty soon here came a little girl who said she always wanted to ride on a dolphin, having heard stories of such things all her life as a girl in the village of Opononi.  She said her name was such-and-such but I could call her Sparky, and she climbed on board.  When that happened something funny happened to me:  I forgot about the whole rest of everything that ever happened to me, and maybe what it really was was the demon taking over since he seemed to have such a fondness for the human race, but from then on all I cared about was having a good time with these people.

Every morning I waited for Sparky and her friends to come out to the beach and play with me.  I gave lots of rides, especially for Sparky who seemed to fit on my back the best of all.  They named me Opo of Opononi and sold tickets so people could come to their beach and watch me give rides to their children.  It was one big long happy picnic, and that magic valve in my forehead vibrated and formed stupendous streamers of sonar every time I thought about my human friends.  Unbeknownst to me, the demon was now in complete control, and my empty shell was, at least for now, filled up.

Then one day some fishermen were shooting off dynamite in the water and I became disoriented and forgot where I was, what the tides were doing and all that.  I got so woozy I had to take a little nap, and when I woke up I was lying on the sand all dried up.  I tried like hell to wriggle back to the water, but had no strength, and in my panic all I managed to do was to get wedged between two rocks, and that’s how I died.

So much for Opo of Opononi.

 

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