A Very Minor Prophet Read online

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR:

  Title Page

  Preface

  THE FIRST BOOK OF BOOKER TO THE AMERICANS

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  THE SECOND BOOK OF BOOKER TO THE AMERICANS

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  THE FIRST BOOK OF FLYNN TO THE UNIVERSE

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  FUCK!

  Chapter XXXVI

  Copyright Page

  To my parents, Jim & Dodi Frost, who will hate this book but still love me. And to Portland, Oregon, the city of eternal spring.

  Acknowledgements

  URIDICULOUS NUMBER OF PEOPLE AND entities helped me write this, some of whom I will undoubtedly fail to mention. To those I forget, all apologies. You can laugh at me in the afterlife while I burn in hell.

  First and foremost, thank you to the wonder-press Hawthorne Books, for opening the fifty-megabyte document that this book originally arrived in. So few dared look at its unusually illustrated pages. Rhonda Hughes, Adam O’Connor Rodriguez, Liz Crain, Adam McIsaac – never has a book entered the world more appropriately dressed.

  I would also like to thank the myriad of Portland writing groups with whom I shared pages, laughs, and the occasional Vicodin. Joan Rogers, Magdalen Powers, Gerard Fleck, Bo Yu, Dan Eckhart, Jeff Selin, Luciana Lopez, Kristin Thiel, Monica Drake, Diana Jordan, Lidia Yuknavitch, Erin Leonard, Cheryl Strayed, Mary Wysong- Haeri, Suzy Vitello, Chelsea Cain, and Chuck Palahniuk. Other early readers, and dear friends, were T. J. Firpo, Joe Frost, and Brad Bortnem.

  Also vital to the writing of this book were zines, particularly those produced by the bicycling gang, C.H.U.N.K. 666, and by Sean Tejaratchi, the author of the incredible collection of religious iconography found in Crap Hound. To these and all others whose work I cut, pasted, taped, Sharpied, co-mingled, over-Xeroxed, and Photoshopped, I claim adoration and fair use.

  A Very Minor Prophet is a book about a place, and so it couldn’t have been written without many special places. Thanks particularly to the Oregon Writers’ Colony, that roughhewn cabin on the coast where words fly off the page; the Writers’ Dojo, for providing a lofty escape; and to the many coffee shop owners in Portland who brew the good stuff and let me stay for hours.

  I should also mention the book The Five Gospels, written by the Jesus Seminar. Your color-coding amuses me. And Ace Typewriter, the last typewriter repair shop in America, for bringing an ancient Underwood typewriter back to life for $4.95.

  I’d also like to thank Rosalee Rester, and my two children, Ava Frost and Atticus Frost. Enduring the struggles of a crazy-haired writer in the basement was a difficult cross to bear. Also unforgettable was the talented memoirist, Kerry Cohen. You lifted me up in my darkest hour.

  Finally, and most weirdly, I would like to thank that young man who started this novel many years ago—the one who suffered constant misdirection, doubt, self-loathing, shame, and rejection to pursue a calling. I promise never to do it to you again. – JBF

  Portland, Oregon; Summer 2011

  ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR:

  The Artichoke Trail

  World Leader Pretend

  The only way to the truth is through blasphemy. FLANNERY O’CONNOR, Wise Blood

  Preface to this Edition

  Where I Tell You

  What You

  Already Know

  YOU ALREADY KNOW HOW THIS GOSPEL ends. Safe in your quiet homes, on television, on YouTube, on your respective conservative or liberal blogs, you saw a ragged, bearded crowd of young men, fists in the air, bouncing up and down in bedeviled excitement. You heard them chant, and you watched as the news station cut to an embedded reporter – another young man, bearded himself, but wearing camouflage and clearly distinguishable from the masses by his white skin. Blue-lit, you stared at your screen, bored by a lingering war. The young man spoke, translating the chant from foreign Arabic to familiar English, and what he said jarred you to attention, so that you knocked over a beer, or took a misstep on a Stairmaster, or nearly fell backwards off a pregnancy ball. “They are chanting,” announced the reporter, his face a mask, clearly enjoying the drama of a pause, “Behead the midget! Behead the midget!”

  It went viral, the clip. The pundits played it and replayed it and replayed it again. They put it in context. He was a cult leader, a pacifist, a freak. He had walked into a war zone. He had gotten what he deserved.

  You watched Jay Leno that night, and despite the morbidity of the moment, you laughed when he started his joke, “So a midget preacher walks into Baghdad…” And you laughed even more when he stopped there, a smug look on his jowly face, a twinkle in his buggy eyes, because he’d already delivered the punchline. You were happy then, because what you’d wanted to do, what you’d ached to do when the reporter had first delivered his line, what you hadn’t quite had the courage to do when you first saw the clip, you were now given permission to do by an authoritative source: you had wanted to laugh at the death of another human. And so you did, you laughed. America laughed.

  It’s a permanent part of our lexicon, this moment in time, like four soldiers planting a flag at Iwo Jima. This small person, this dwarf – hell, as Bill Maher pointed out, let’s just say what we’re thinking – this midget, he travels to Iraq, some crazed notion of single-handedly bringing peace to a besieged nation, and within hours he is swept up, stock images of mad Arabic masses driven into a killing frenzy, and then, this part deleted by the networks but available on the Web, there is his bloodied head, paraded around Baghdad on a mezza platter.

  Successful late night comedy.

  After they’d figured out who he was and where he lived, the paparazzi converged upon Portland, Oregon, upon this dreamy-eyed city, and they found us, the midget’s friends. They asked us questions, for which we provided long and complicated answers. Then they took the long and complicated answers and cut them out. Film left on the floor. They showed, instead, our faces, our young and frightened and distraught faces, and under our faces they displayed our names, and next to our names were the words CULT MEMBER, blackletters over a field of red, white, and blue.

  The frenzy let up. The paparazzi tired of the rain and flew back to their big, sprawling, dry cities to the south and east. After they left we laid our friend to rest, head reunited with body, in the ground under a color-filled copse of Northwest maples.

  Many months later, I got the stomach to watch the footage. I’ll never know for sure what happened, how his head became John the Baptist-ed on a silver disk. But I do know one thing. My friend had been a prophet.

  Albeit, a very minor one.

  THE FIRST BOOK OF BOOKER TO THE AMERICANS

  Chapter I

  Where I, Bartholomew Flynn, First Encounter Joseph Patrick Booker, and Where He Stands Aloft o
n His Pulpit for the First Time

  THE GOSPEL OF JOSEPH PATRICK BOOKER BEGINS ON A SUNDAY MORNING at the tail end of September, a day when a sandy-haired, green-eyed, twenty-two year-old of average height and weight, a young man named Bartholomew Flynn (that’s me!), woke up too early, having nothing to do, having no plans, feeling as I often did those days that life was really quite meaningless. I woke up and did what I often did on mornings where I’d risen in this existential funk – I grabbed my messenger bag, the blue-linen journal I got for ninety-nine cents at Walgreens, and headed out the door on my pink and aqua-colored vintage Bridgestone bicycle, planning to ride to the Mecca Café, where I’d sit with the aforementioned journal and write about how I’d woken up too early, how I had nothing to do, how I had no plans, and how I felt that life was really quite meaningless.

  The weather today was what my friend Beale and I called cith agus dealán, which in Celtic means sunshine with showers. (We’d memorized all the Celtic words and phrases for rain, which come in quite handy when one lives in Portland, Oregon.)

  There was currently more shower than sun, and as I rode down the narrow corridor of Failing Street, getting splashed, despite their dutiful efforts to avoid doing so, by the drivers of Subaru Outbacks and Volvos passing me by, I cursed my overconfidence in the sliver of blue sky I’d seen when leaving my apartment that morning: I’d left my rain gear at home.

  I was contemplating whether to turn around or spend the day in soggy jeans when a second misfortune beset me, my tires rode through a field of glass, the detritus of some suburban meth addict’s failed attempt to nab a car stereo, and with an emphatic spsssssh, my journey to the local coffee shop to record my daily boredom and angst had become more complex.

  Many months later, when I told him about my state of mind on that day, Booker would repeat himself, a smile of serendipity on his somewhat Mongoloid face, “Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.”

  At the moment, though, I wasn’t aware that I was asking, seeking, or knocking. I was simply in desperate need of a quick tire change. I wheeled the bike over the curb, laid it in a pile of wet mulch, slung my helmet into a nest of ferns, then knelt on the sidewalk beside the bicycle, unzippering my wedge bag and spreading out my tools.

  The building in front of which this took place was a church, although, as far as I could guess, it hadn’t been used as a church for quite some time – it had the stained glass windows, the bell tower, the ubiquitous cross on the side that marked a church – but now it appeared to be some sort of residence, and judging by the look of it, the residence of a disgruntled aging hippie.

  A giant Jolly Roger flew from the flagpole where the American flag might have been. There was a letterboard out front, the kind frequently seen in front of churches that usually have on them some sort of believe-and-be-saved hoopla, only rather than a biblical quote, this one had the latest George W. Bush bumble. (That day’s read: WE MUST NOT BE DIVIDERS; WE MUST BE UNIFICATORS.)

  There was more ephemera on the church’s front doors – a whole slew of bumper stickers pasted one over the other (KBOO – Homemade Radio, Keep Portland Weird, What would Jesus Drive?, Praying is Begging, W is for War.) The crème de la crème of the whole concoction was a banner hung over the red brick of the bell tower, which read, in big black letters: IMPEACH BUSH.

  The church was one of those local landmarks that made me chuckle, one of the reasons I’d come to live in this strange moss-ridden town.

  The rain by then had gone from steady to a true downpour: a taom fearthainne – a bucketing down of rain. I sorted through the tools on the sidewalk, and as I did so, a feeling hit my stomach, as if I’d swallowed the pit of some forbidden fruit – I’d forgotten it, the one essential every-cyclist-must-have-it-with-them-at-all-times tool.

  It was then he appeared, and it was odd, because although I was genuflecting before him on the sidewalk, his eyes met mine on a level. He presented me something straight-armed, as if it were a sword with which he planned to beknight me.

  “Ask, and ye shall receive,” he said. “Seek, and ye shall find.”

  The object in his hand was a bike pump.

  I just stared at his face. What else do you do when a midget appears out of nowhere, and in your time of need, when you’re minus a bike pump, hands you a bike pump? You stare at his face.

  The face could have been black or Asian or Hispanic or Native American, or some combination. It was that wide-eyed half-Asian face that the media outlets show when they’re demonstrating world demographics, when they’re trying to prove that the average human being isn’t white.

  In other words, Booker had the face of the everyman.

  “Come change it inside,” he said. “I’ve got coffee … it’s Stumptown.”

  Despite the weirdness of the situation, this was not going to be easy to argue against. When offered a dry place to do a bike repair and a cup of Portland’s finest brand of coffee to keep you warm, how do you say no?

  A yard sign had been hammered into the overgrown garden, with the words, hastily painted in red and now streaking in the rain, CHURCH SERVICE TODAY: ALL WELCOME.

  He sensed, as he had an uncanny knack of doing, exactly what I was thinking when I saw it, “I’m not religious,” he said, “I’m anti-religious, just like you. That’s oversimplifying, of course, because anti-religion is what makes both you and me religious, but let’s not get into that.”

  He walked up the sidewalk and up the stairs to the front doors of his church. I followed without really thinking, wheeling my bike beside me and eyeing the dry stoop. He kept talking, not once making eye-contact to be sure I was listening.

  “You see, what I want to start is a retro faith, a sort of a time meld between Galilee and the Summer of Love, minus the patchouli. I want something that challenges authority, you know, something that goes back to the core teachings about how the rich are fucked and how the meek shall inherit the earth and how we should give Caesar back all his coinage, and how … how the Kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, how it starts out small and insignificant – and then grows into this big, twisted, chaotic shrub that grows everywhere, even in the middle of the desert, that cannot be eradicated, no matter how hard you try to kill it. I want – God how do you do this? – how do you start a faith and get followers and all that shit? I mean, it’s so … so necessary right now.”

  Once we reached the stoop, we paused. If anyone else had accosted me like this, rambling on about faith and the Kingdom of God and attempting to convert me, I would have ignored him. Maybe I would have borrowed the bike pump and taken the coffee, but I certainly wouldn’t have asked him further questions about the God he was pimping. Booker, though, draped in a black cassock at least three sizes too big for him, was too unreal to simply ignore. It was as if a cut-out cartoon character had been beamed before me. I had to engage him to make sure he was real, “You’re really a preacher?”

  Booker looked up at me. Aflame-red Holy Spirit stole, the kind that Catholic school children wear to their Confirmations, complete with doves crudely cut and glued on, hung around his neck. There wasn’t a hint of irony in his eyes. “Not yet,” he said. “But I’m working on it.”

  “Don’t you have to go to divinity school or something?” I asked.

  Booker scratched his head as if the question had never occurred to him. “Why? I mean, it doesn’t work that way. Like if you’re called, if one day you wake up and know you’ve been called, you have to just listen, you know. Did Paul go to divinity school? Peter?”

  I wanted to tell him that two-thousand years had passed, that things worked a little differently now, but he seemed, well, so touched in the head I left it alone.

  “That’s unusual,” I said.

  “I guess it is,” he replied, “but Jesus was unusual.”

  It would take a while before my skin stopped crawling when Booker mentioned Jesus. It was such a code amongst Portland hipsters, you couldn’t mention Jesus
without a snicker. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. Jesus. See, if you’re like me, it’s painful.

  The bucketing down of rain wasn’t stopping. Booker walked into his church and held open the door. I don’t remember making the decision, exactly. It was sort of a feeling that this was weird, and weird is good, or at least weird is what I was supposed to be about, and maybe weird was actually bad, but if I didn’t want to be a poser I had to accept weird. I mean, KEEP PORTLAND WEIRD, it’s like the local religion.

  I walked through that held-open door.

  The adjective that springs to mind to describe the inside of Booker’s church is post-apocalyptic. Rather than traditional wood pews and kneelers, Booker’s church was furnished with rows of old theater seats, likely salvaged from one of the many single-screen theaters that multiplexes were running out of town. The rows were all of different lengths – some seats were in pairs, some in threes; others came in much larger sets of eight, ten, or twelve. Booker had bolted these down to the hardwood floors in what appeared to be a hurried and not-so-thoughtful fashion. There was no aisle in the church and the rows were uneven; some seats were cramped up against the row in front of them, while others had abundant space for leg stretching but were slightly askew, angled incorrectly, so that you were facing the front corner of the room rather than the altar. Many of the chairs weren’t bolted in all the way, so that when you sat in them and leaned back you ended up facing the ceiling.

  Later, I’d come to believe that perhaps this layout wasn’t as unplanned as I had originally thought; for I discovered that no matter where I sat in Booker’s church something was slightly off, as if Booker were trying to remind us of one of his central tenets: that our lives were intended to be chaotic and imperfect, and that God very much wanted things to be that way. The haphazard layout also caused awkward personal space issues amongst churchgoers, which had the effect of forcing people to talk to one another.