The Portable Promised Land Page 3

  “WE AIN’T GOIN NO PLACE, DADDY!” a sister cried out and even Love had to laugh.

  “Love once knew a woman who’d died and gone to Heaven! In her years on Earth she’d been chained by the manacles of repression and the shackles of inhibition. She’d been something of a ram, bangin her head against those who loved her, and something of a jellyfish, stingin those who got too close, and something of a prayin mantis, lovin a man then devourin him.”

  The church moaned.

  “When she got to Heaven St. Peter said, ‘You ain’t ready.’ So she went to Love and Love went to the Good Book.

  “Good Book say... ‘The spirit of God dwelleth within you,’ and that is true. Oh yes, that spirit dwelleth within you,” he said, and his eyes landed in the front row on a well-preserved woman under a faded scarlet hat, “and... you,” gazing at a woman seated next to her with long braided hair flowing from a sun-yellow beret, “and mos definitely... you,” freezing on a girl, her tight ponytail held in place by an unblemished white ribbon. Daddy Love’s eyes locked onto her and he let out the first part of a very deep breath and a single drop of sweat quivered at the edge of his eyebrow, then broke away and soared down toward his Bible. Daddy Love snapped to attention.

  “The spirit of God dwelleth within all! So if you want to feel the spirit of God, to experience the full grip of God’s love, you must grip another of God’s creatures firmly! You must lock onto another body in which God dwelleth and experience that love WILDLY!”

  “Lock onto me, LAWD!!!”

  “So one day many years later this sister was called back to Heaven. St. Peter took her to see God Himself because He Himself wanted to ask her about her extra time on Earth. And when she got to the Father, to the trial of her life, she was asked one question: ‘Did you, in your time on Earth, did ya love your fellow human beings in a Gawdly way?’ O h Lord my brothers and beloved sisters, when that question comes to you, you’ve got to be able to say to your Lord a resoundin, ‘Yes Lawd! Yes Lawd! A thousand times I did! Yes Lawd!’ Can Love get an Ayy-men?”

  “Praise JEEE-SUS!”

  “Well, she told the King of Kings: ‘My Lord, I have let freedom ring! I have let freedom ring from the bedroom to the back-seat! In the ocean and in dark caves and in midair, inches below your home, in first class — I have let freedom ring!’ And the Lord smiled on her then and gave her wings and I tell you now, her time in Heaven was as long and fruitful as the very member of our Maker must be! HAAALL-LAY-LOOO-YAAAAAHHHH!!!”

  And with that they unleashed a roar that tested the walls and the band leapt into the thunder with righteous riffs and hardly a body was seated, for everyone was dancing, wild and free, clogging the aisles and shaking the pews, rocking their asses and flapping their hands madly in the air. They had not a care in the world, certainly not that it was Sunday morning and it seemed no different than Saturday night.

  As Daddy Love came down from the pulpit the organist led Love’s Angels into song and they followed in high, soulful voices.

  “Ain’t no way...

  for me to love you...

  if you won’t let me!

  It ain’t no way,

  for me to give you all you need. If you won’t,

  let me give all of me!”

  One sister stepped forward and took the lead.

  “I know that a woman’s duty...is to haaave and love a man....”

  “Looovve...” the others sang, backing her up.

  “...But how can I, how can I, how can I ...” she sang with her hands windmilling furiously, “give ya all the things I can... if you’re tying both of my hands?”

  “Tie me... .” the Angels sang.

  “It ain’t no way...!” the leader sang, then opened her eyes and saw Daddy Love standing by her side, his massive body filled with the spirit, his shoulders trembling.

  “...For me to lovvve you,” she sang into Daddy Love’s eyes. “ If you won’t let me.” Daddy Love then began rocking from heel to toe, heel to toe, gaining momentum like a child on a swing, then he bent low and leapt a full foot into the air.

  With his size no one expected to see Daddy Love hold even that much sway over gravity, so none were prepared for what came next. Daddy Love, empowered by momentum, bent again, deeper this time, and leapt into the air. First he was a foot off the ground, then two, then four, then six, the titanic Daddy Love floating up and up, ten feet, twenty, his eyes closed, his hands outstretched, his face as peaceful as a just-fed baby. The music had stopped, the Angels were silent, and the church was filled with statues, mouths agape at their gargantuan leader hanging placidly, fifty feet in the air, almost close enough to touch the ceiling.

  A woman, her mouth open, touched her husband gently, as if full consciousness of the moment might end it. “It’s a miracle,” she whispered.

  Then someone stirred. It was Lily Backjack. Even hanging fifty feet in the air with his eyes closed Daddy Love could feel her stare, so cold ain’t nothin in Hell could burn you worse.

  Lily Backjack had once been Daddy’s favorite Angel, had once been a girl as pure as a new day. Then she abruptly left the church and, soon after, high school. Now there was a bulge in her stomach. As she walked up the aisle toward the stage the church scrambled out of her way.

  Daddy Love just hung there high above them, frozen. All you could hear was the hard, steady clack, clack of her tall, black boots. When Lily reached the stage she grabbed hold of one of the thick, wooden boards and gave it a malevolent jerk to create a sliver of space. It was all she needed. She reached into her pocket, pulled out a single match, looked up at Daddy Love, and forced a smile his way. “Now, alla thems will know,” she said, “whether or not I loveded you.” She lifted up the sole of her right boot and in one fluid arc lit the match against her heel and dropped it into the void. Pools of old, nasty chicken grease waited to suck it in. Lily turned with a flip of her long, straight hair and began walking back down the aisle. For three seconds, the clack, clack of her boots was the only sound. Then an evil boom. Lily pushed a tortured smile through a river of tears as she walked out of the building. Then the entire stage turned into a giant pool of tall, magenta flames.

  Through the four seconds it took to clear the church Daddy Love stayed calm. And during the following four seconds, as the stage grew and grew into a vast barbeque pit over which he hung like a giant free-range Perdue chicken, Daddy Love refused to panic. But when he saw three men — who’d disappeared just before he began to fly — burst from behind the curtain at the back of the stage, sprint through tall waves of fire, and race out the door trailing bright yellow, only then did Daddy Love lose his cool. He began to shake and wriggle, but could only twist and turn and help himself be cooked more evenly. He could not loosen the wires that held him up. He could not lose altitude, could not free himself from the invisible cross he’d put himself on. An edge of robe drooped down and a flaming tongue leapt up like a hungry shark and bit into it. He reached down and snuffed out that small blaze, but the fire was growing fast, climbing the walls and scrambling round the floor, dancing, wild and free, broiling the aisles and eating the pews, flapping its hands madly in the air without a care in the world.

  Daddy Love looked out over his burning church and saw that in the corner there was someone left, a boy lying on the floor, clutching his ankle, cringing in pain, the joint spilling blood that was a red much fuller and blacker than that of the yellowish red of the fire racing toward him from all sides.

  “Daddy!” the boy screamed out. “Fly down! Save me!”

  Daddy Love struggled again to free himself and succeeded only in making his robe fall fully open so the boy could see he had on a cheap pair of white cotton briefs.

  “Save me, Daddy!” the boy bawled like a babe. “Aaahh!”

  Then Daddy Love stopped squirming, wiped his sweaty face, closed his eyes, and bowed his giant head in prayer. He felt not the fire leaping and licking from all sides at his toes and neck and ass, but only the need to call on the Lord. �
�Father!” he screamed out above the deafening cackles of the burning building. “Have I strayed? Have I gone wrong in trying to give my flock the sunshine they need to get through the days, to get through the jungles keeping them from happiness? Hath I erred in trying to use your name and your teachings to show my flock how to be happier and freer and more loving? Have I not employed your name to make lives brighter? Lord, any mortal can see a man’s fall, but only you know his internal struggling, the tears shed in the midnight of his soul. Please Lord, don’t take the boy. Reach down and touch us now.”

  Daddy Love looked into the corner, but a blindingly yellow patch of flames had taken it over. Inside his giant chest hot tears began shaking loose. Then he looked up. The boy was floating slowly and calmly in the air, ten feet, twenty, forty, up toward the ceiling, out of the reach of the fire on each wall, snatching at him and missing. Soon he reached the ceiling. Fire had chomped at almost every inch of wall and crevice of floor and the boy floated through a fire-eaten hole in the ceiling and landed on a part of the roof. He looked back through the hole at Daddy Love, fire from everywhere closing in on him as he dangled helplessly in midair. Daddy Love looked at the boy and mouthed, Don’t linger now. The boy leapt from the roof half a moment before it caved in and landed squarely on the KFC sign. In the parking lot around Kentucky Fried Souls the congregation watched the walls of the church crash in on one another, leaving the immense palace a huge pile of blackened rubble. Then, a rumor began slithering through the crowd. Girrrl, Daddy ain’t gilded lil Lily.... was that no-good Bishop! Meanwhile, the boy sat safely, waving gleefully, sixty feet up, atop the portrait of that good ol’ neo-massa Colonel Sanders, as a fractured but breathing memory of Daddy Love began its ascent into rare air.

  THE BREAKUP CEREMONY

  DEDICATED TO MY EX-GIRLFRIEND

  “If you don’t have anything bad to say about a relationship, you shouldn’t say anything at all.”

  — George Costanza

  Coltrane Jones and Amber Sunshower are breaking up today. They’ve been dating for most of three years, living together for two, talking about marriage for one, and, for the last six months, they’ve been breaking up slowly, Chinese water torture slowly. A breakup of this sort, after so much time and so much dreaming and so much pain, is a shift of the tectonic plates of two lives. That’s why today, this warm, late-June Saturday afternoon, at a borrowed home in Soul City’s ritzy Honeypot Hill, the end of this long, momentous relationship is being marked by a Breakup Ceremony.

  This is a relatively new custom in Soul City, but it’s been gaining in popularity over the past few years among couples that have been together long enough to have gained that plateau where people are watching and wondering if or when they’ll marry. When a breakup seems inevitable the couple will pick a date, invite their friends, and hold a public ceremony commemorating their end. The ceremony usually starts just as the sun is beginning to make way for evening. The couple emerges together, though not touching and usually not looking at each other. They are always well dressed so as to give off the appearance of doing well in that trying moment, though on many occasions it’s clear that one of the parties had been well dressed and then, consumed by the grief of finality or the grip of chemicals or both, proceeded to paw away at their suit or dress all the way to disheveledness.

  They assemble in front of their friends, who are divided by affiliation — his friends on one side of the aisle, hers on the other. This is an important segment of the young ritual, giving members of the community a chance to choose a side, to silently declare their loyalty.

  During the ceremony two preselected members of the audience come forward to say a few words about the couple (“I always knew you guys would never make it,” or “I told her to leave you nine months ago”). Then each member of the couple gets one sentence to vow, that is, to publicly state their main gripe with the other. “I vow that you are just too plain selfish,” or “I vow that you never really listened to me.” But both must say their vow at the same time so no one can say they didn’t get the last word. Then a photograph of the two is burned and dropped to the ground so the ashes can mix with the dirt and be lost forever. Attendees are invited to stomp on the spot where the ashes fall, symbolically pushing them down further. Then the group breaks into two parties. The men rumble off to a stripper-clogged rebachelorization party. Women retreat into a bridal shower without a bride, giving the newly single woman gifts she’ll need in her now man-less life (maybe a VCR, a health-club membership, a set of tools). The women’s event sometimes includes a black-leather-masked male who is whipped on his bare buttocks with a thick leather strap. This whipping often lasts hours, often draws blood, and, women say, is quite therapeutic.

  Some from outside of Soul City are amazed at these ceremonies, amazed that a volatile separating couple can occupy the same space for the ten minutes it takes to conduct a Breakup Ceremony. But many in Soul City choose to have a Breakup Ceremony because of its cotillion aspect. The ceremony spreads the word that it’s over, freeing the two from many awkward questions, sending a tacit message to anyone who’s maybe been waiting for the relationship to dissolve. Body language speaks volumes, especially when standing beside that other person, and goes a long way toward improving one’s stock within the community and shifting the perception of fault, even though most who’ve attended more than one Breakup Ceremony know that the during-ceremony stoicness of most breaking couples owes much to large quantites of Mr. Valium and Dr. Jack Daniels.

  Coltrane and Amber’s ceremony proceeded almost exactly according to plan. Almost. Their friends knew it would be difficult for the tumultuous pair to stand beside each other for those last ten minutes, and so they added a few touches to the ceremony in hopes of eliciting their best behavior. Reverend Hallelujah Jones was tapped to officiate, though really there was nothing for him to do besides stand there, barely five-foot-two and as fragile as a man made of aluminum foil, with a little curly gray hair clinging to the sides of his head and so much curly gray hair bursting from his ears he appeared to have the frayed ends of a Kleenex peeking out of them. He’d baptized nearly everyone in Soul City under thirty-five, including both Coltrane and Amber, and thus commanded a certain respect. But he was not enough to keep a Jerry Springer show from breaking out on this day.

  Amber’s friends also added her mother, Peaches, to the program, giving her the job of walking up the aisle toward the couple at the end of the ceremony, taking her daughter’s hand, and escorting her down the aisle and away from Coltrane, symbolic of taking her back. Amber has never been married and thus never been given away, meaning the gesture did not really make any symbolic sense at all. The hollow symbol was merely window dressing for the concrete attempt to extract ten minutes of peace from the fiery pair.

  At a few minutes to six the couple emerged from the back door of the borrowed country home, each on one side of Reverend Jones. Coltrane was impressively cool in a navy tailored suit with a mint-green silk tie, matching shirt, and pricey leather shoes. Amber looked luminous in a red Versace dress with a plunging neckline, her shoes frighteningly high brown Jimmy Choo open-toe slingbacks, her ears twinkling with diamond studs, her hair swept up and laced with miniature pink roses. At Breakup Ceremonies couples dress to arouse the jealousy of the other party (as if to say, look at all this you’re gonna miss), and to possibly arouse someone in the crowd because a Breakup Ceremony is always the start of an unspoken race. People in Soul City believe whoever starts their next solid relationship first is proven to be the more desirable and less troublesome member of the couple, ergo, the winner.

  At the appointed time Coltrane, Amber, and Reverend Jones came out of the house, moved into view at the Reverend’s slow pace, and stopped at the top of the stairs. “We are gathered here today,” the Reverend said, “to witness the conclusion of a wonderful relationship between two wonderful people.” Amber leaned away from the Reverend, afraid his lies might earn him a thunderbolt. He offered a few more fabrications i
ntended only to put the best possible bow on the bad situation, but his fictions fooled no one. At every Breakup Ceremony, during the cocktail reception that precedes the main event, people feel compelled to swap the most gory bits of gossip about the relationship and its failure, knowing this is the last chance to spread such information. It’s a sortof going-out business sale on gossip. After his final falsehood, the Reverend invited Amber’s best friend, Camilla Clothespony, to come and say a few words. She was supposed to be followed by Coltrane’s friend Huggy Bear Jackson and then Amber’s mom, Peaches, but Camilla already knew she would be the day’s final speaker.

  It’s been said far too often that Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. But in so many cases that fury is a wet matchstick compared to the roaring blaze that is the fury of a woman scorned’s best friend. Camilla took her place at the foot of the steps and faced the couple. “If ever there were two people who should not be together it was these two,” she began with an acid voice. “You’re weak, spineless, pathetic, and ya know what, Amber lied: it’s not all about the motion of the ocean!” The Breakup Ceremony is the place to expunge one’s feelings about the breakup, and as the sole speaker from Amber’s community Camilla had every right to speak publicly of her anger. However, her toast, barely one sentence old, was already evidencing ire well beyond the appropriate. “And you know what she said? Sex with you is like math class! Very boring and filled with mistakes!” She was far beyond control now, eyes soaked, teeth clenched, a momma bear fierce in the face of an attacker. The crowd was paralyzed, torn between stopping her and enjoying the show. “And did you think,” Camilla yelled, looking right at Coltrane, her voice breaking from tears, “I would let you just walk away scot-free, you little rat? Amber, you would not listen to me during this so-called relationship, but now you’ll hear me when I show you what a lying little boy he is!”