Drive-Thru Dayton Dialogue by Joshua Minton
by Joshua Minton
Author's Preface: This story was written nine years ago and was workshopped by George Looney's entire Creative Writing Workshop class at BGSU. This was a rather bold experiment with the second person narrative that didn't go over too well--partly because of the radicalism of the ideas expressed, partly because of the drug references, but mostly because it took someone with balls as big as the world to even attempt to write something like this. [Editing Note: This was scanned in OCR and there is likely some mistakes that will be fixed in the coming days--please forgive these in the meantime.]
He leans across the front seat and rolls the window down. “Get in. Throw your bags in the back.”
From the back of the green station wagon, you see him run a hand through his gray hair and extinguish a cigarette in the ashtray. You walk to the passenger side and get in. He shakes your hand. “My name is Joseph Cooglias.”
He looks you up and down, you feel as if your clothes are being scanned and catalogued. You are sure that he has noticed your tongue stud and he’ll never see the nipple ring. “You’re not running from the law are you?”
You shake your head and say no, my name is Crystal Noman and I’m just trying to get a ride to Cincinnati. My best friend from high school has Pink Floyd tickets for me, but I have to be there two days ahead to claim them. And since it’s the middle of the week, nobody at school’s leaving till’ the weekend, so I had to hitch. Let me ask you a question, you’re not one of those freakrapist-sickfucker’s that you hear about on the news are you?
He shakes his head, smiles and offers his hand again. His hands are rough with calluses that dig into your own soft skin. When you close the door and roll the window back up, he accelerates slow and smooth back into the traffic of 1-75. No one says a word until the first rest stop. He buys you and himself a Coke and Butterfinger. “Crystal, what are you studying in school?” You look at his face and tell him you’re an economics major with a minor in marketing.
He chuckles inside his mouth without making his obvious condescension into a public statement. Butterfinger crumbles from his mouth and falls into his lap. He brushes it onto the floorboard. “You know what kid, you might as well go buy a safe, lock yourself inside and wait to die.” You recoil in surprise and your face becomes hot, your hands begin to sweat. What the fuck are you talking about mister? student graduating with honors next semester.
He pulls a Marlboro medium from the pack, lights it and rolls the window down halfway. “What I mean Crystal, is that what this world needs today are not pimps and pornographers, but intelligent people that are sensitive enough to free themselves from this nightmare of chaos that the state of the world is in today.”
You ask what he means by pimps and pornographers?
He glances at you serious and pulls a silver flask, engraved with the initials IC, from his jacket pocket. He fills it with a bottle of Jack Daniels that he takes from under the seat. “All advertising art is pornography since it’s intended to make the observer possess the object being represented. A pimp is someone who pushes something on another person by using this pornographic method. Crystal you are in school learning how to be pimp, selling shit to people with pornographic methods and that’s a fact.”
You’re pissed. Your hands clench and sweat more. He takes a drink from the just filled flask and winces, while screwing the top back on. You ask what gives him the right to pass judgement on you. “This isn’t about me Crystal, this is about facts. And the fact is that propaganda and belief rule this melodramatic world of human affairs. Belief is the only thing that could possibly separate the human race.” You cock your head in confusion; the insult is slipping away. You say, what do you mean Joe, there’s lots of things that separate people; things like race, religion, and what economic or political society you belong to?
He laughs, staring at the passing farms. You notice the roof of one barn has a huge rebel flag painted on with a “Member of the Local Klan” sign by the fence in the yard. “Crystal, who or what is it that acknowledges those differences you listed?” His question intrigues you and throws you into a wall at the same time. You say, what do you mean, I’m the one who acknowledges them?”
He puckers his lips and blows a breath of disapproval. “Crystal, were you born knowing how to talk or how to drive a car?” No but I don’t see how that... “That means that not only those differences you listed, but the very way that you think has been acquired by your mind through experience and time. That is the essence of belief. Belief is of the past and the past is experience of suffering, so the mind, acting through experience of the past, carries suffering into the present moment of life.”
You switch your weight to lean against the door. You say, that makes sense but what’s so wrong about it? e takes another drink. “Beliefs separate human beings. The Christians say they believe in God, the Muslims say they believe in God, and the Jews say they believe in God, but at the same time they’re all fighting each other because they each have different metaphors for the same idea.”
You realize that this is correct and you ask if he is an atheist. He shakes his head. “No, I’m a very religious person, but the word God is a belief, an idea that has been created out of fear, and it has been used to exploit people.”
You say, but you do believe that God exists? He looks into your eyes.
“Crystal, whether you believe that God exists or not has absolutely no relevance to the fact that human beings all over the world suffer. You don’t ask if the Sun is shining or if London exists, it’s there, it’s a fact. And as long as one human being on this planet suffers, the word God is an illusion brought about by insecurity and fear.”
You say damn, I guess that means that something’s wrong with the way that human beings think. You look ahead to the stretching highway that lies before you. Clouds are gathering from the south.
He nods his head. “That’s right, children in school aren’t taught how to think, they are taught what to think. Now Crystal, you’ve got to understand before we go any further in this conversation that I’m not trying to prove something to you. I’m not trying to be some damn genius or make you think that I’m this savior come to heal the world or any bullshit like that, I mean heaven knows I have my vices.” He holds the flask up. “I just want to have a discussion with you, as a member of the generation that will inherit control of this ecopoligious madness. I wonder how you, a child of the democratic dream, plan to govern the affairs of this world?”
His long wind stimulates you in a deep place, possibly a door in your mind that you didn’t even know was there.
You nod without expression and enter Joseph’s head. His movements, his gestures, the energy behind his words are tempting your morals, questioning your beliefs, opening you up, perhaps even causing you to consciously mutate into a state of open inquiry. You are completely alive.
He takes another swig from the flask, winces again and offers you some. You refuse and pull a joint out of your own pocket. You push in the car lighter and wait for it to pop. “So, you’re going to see the Floyd huh? I saw them in 77’ at Riverfront Coliseum during the Animals tour. I sat in the fourth row.” Yo ‘re intrigued agaiir this man has to be about fifty years old. You ask what a guy like m was doing at a Pink Floyd concert, mald a mental note that at the time he stated, Roger Waters was still in the band and the Animals album was a concept derived from the George Orwell book Animal Farm. You pass the joint and he takes a hit, holding the smoke in his lungs for a few seconds and then exhales through his nose, dragon-style.
He passes the joint back to you. “When I was a priest, a member of my parish operated the ticket sales for the amphitheater. Now this was back before Ticketmaster made a monopoly on concert sales.”
You’re amazed that this guy used to be a priest, but after a few seconds you see that it fits, but there has to be more to this story.
You look at him closely; his black sport jacket with the flask pocket on the inside, his black suede boots, black silk slacks with business socks and a button up white silk shirt. He has a violent scar running from his ear to his lower chin. He catches you looking.
“I got that in Vietnam. I was a chaplain in the Marine Corps, and the VeeCee attacked our unit in the middle of the night. The soldier that did this told me just before I passed out, that the only reason that he left me alive is because I was a religious man and he considered it a bad omen to kill a holy man the first time they met in combat. The Vietnamese are a very deep and proud people Crystal, but you’d never know that living here in rural Ohio.”
He shakes his head in what appears to be dismay. “You don’t hear much of anything about reality around here.”
In a flash of memory never experienced--you can imagine, you can fantasize and speculate about the miles that this man has walked and the light years he has traveled inside his head. You say, if you don’t mind me asking, why did you leave the priesthood? He clears his throat and looks at you serious again, probably attempting to ascertain if you were ready for what he was about to say.
He puts the roach in his mouth and swallows. “I left because of a difference in expression of belief that I and the Cardinal shared. About twenty years ago at the beginning of the New Year, a young boy in my parish testified in court that the Cardinal had molested him on several occasions during private communion conferences. When I confronted the Cardinal about it, he threw his position in my face, saying that if I understood how much power the Church had in the world, I would keep my mouth shut and help to maintain the integrity of the only institution that keeps order in the midst of chaos.”
His index finger punctures the air as he’s speaking, emphasizing the Cardinal’s blasphemy. You put your own fingers up to your face and rub your lips, the warmth of contact feels good against the cold flesh that this mans story inspires. You ask what happened. He lights another Marlboro and continues, “Well, I told the Cardinal to stick his position up his ass and I testified in court to what he threatened me with. The evidence was only circumstantial, but the Cardinal was still defrocked and banished from the Church. He now rut boein Lexington. I was rewarded for my effort by the Bishop, who I also told to stick it in his ass. It was soon after that I became a freelance writer and that’s what I’ve done ever since, just travel and talk.” He nods, marking the end of his story. He flicks the butt out the window and lights another cigarette, looking at you for your response. You are completely silent.
You just passed the halfway mark of the journey and rain begins to pelt the car in fat droplets that spread across the windshield. You will be approaching Dayton and soon after the ride will end. Now that you’re good and stoned , you can concentrate more on the conversation without regards to the conclusion or the arrival.
You say, Jesus how do you feel now about the Church? He looks down to his lap and brushes the remaining Butterfinger crumbs away, then looks back to the road.
“I've thought about that for many years now, through drug experiments, through drug addictions and through drug withdrawals. I’ve thought about the Church and the Bible through my stages as an alcoholic and a womanizer. And even though I’ve been down, lying in the gutter, soaked with my own vomit, I’ve never been low enough to step one foot back inside a church, mosque, or temple of any kind, and I never will. No matter what drug I’ve been addicted to, no matter how desperate I was for a fix, I always knew that the addiction to religious ritual and metaphor is the deadliest vice a human being can hold! Religion has killed more people than any war, disease or natural disaster ever.”
He puts out the cigarette and you can feel your beliefs begin to smolder and ash.
You stare at nothing, your head swaying to the rhythm of emptiness as it pulses inside you. You feel as if you’ve touched the other side of a mystery beyond comprehension. It’s all one big confusing mess. When you recover, you ask if he still considers himself a religious person.
He smiles and grips the wheel tight. “Yes, but to me the truly religious person isn’t the one who goes to church faithfully and worships some god created by man. To me the religious person is the one who steps completely out of the stream of information. The human being that thinks independently of any system of thought or particular ideology, to me that’s a truly religious person.”
Your thoughts gather and you follow the lead of insight by asking him about people like Adolph Hitler who also stepped out of this so-called stream of belief? “But did Hitler step out of the stream completely, or did he merely change the direction of the stream? If he stepped out completely, then his actions in the world would not have been reflective of securing knowledge or territory, because these are things in the stream of experience called time. Jesus Crystal, Hitler’s not the one you should be scared of, it’s the minds of the automatons that followed him that’s really scary.
You ask how he knows all of this. “Have you ever read Mien Kampf?”
You say no.
“It should be required reading, not for worship, but to understand the mind of a deluded individual. Hitler had a limited vision, he was even a very dogmatic person, but the passion that he developed for ritual is what led to the horror of the holocaust. If no one would have followed Hitler’s lead, he would have been a crazy artist with deluded ideas, and he would have died broke and alone. When you can really see the Nazi ritual that millions of Germans worshipped, you’ll understand what happens when people limit themselves to a particular method of society or system of belief.”
The point is well made and leaves you silent. After a few minutes you look back at him and ask how he compares Nazism with his experience of the Church?
He seems almost surprised at your question and a smile invades his face. “There is no difference at all, only for the historian and the fool.”
You ask him to explain.
“Well, the expression of ritual is superficially different, but the source is still the same, fear. All over the world human beings may have different skin color and come from different environments, but underneath this flesh we are each bundles of skin, nerves, muscles, beliefs, desires, fears and conflicting emotion. We are power hungry security fiends. The frightening thing is that some people are more passionate about their suffering than others and seek to blame something or someone, which leads to exploitation and ultimately to the hiding of truth under the veils of lie and belief, which in my book are the same goddamn thing!”
His hands grip the wheel tighter and the whites of his knuckles are exposed, as what seems to be years of penned up aggression come spewing from his mouth. You can almost feel his frustration as if it was infrared radiation and you were a radio telescope. He needed this conversation as much as you did.
You are aware of his bitterness and ask if he is a pessimist?
He shakes his head, “Oh no, not at all, but I am a fan of the observation of reality. I know now that when I began to understand the limitations of my own mind and I dropped all of the beliefs that I had been taught to cling to for security, that’s when I became a sensitive and therefore a religious human being.”
He nods the release of his personal truth to you.
You ask what he considers to be a sensitiv person?
“To me, a sensitive human being is one that listens very close to what is happening around them. Alert and conscious of everything with the eyes, ears, nerves, senses and the brain operating in the most acute fashion, each alert to the slightest stimulus while at the same time understanding their own limitations. To me, only such a serious mind can understand what truth is and what the meaning behind the metaphor God is!”
There is something so empty in what h&s saying, something so final in his words that it creates a void deep within you, a hole that used to be filled with religious scriptures and belief that has been passed down in your family for generations. All of that false security is burning away and the feeling it leaves can only be described as cold. You say that not all priests rape little children. He was a good priest, so why should he condemn all organized religion for the mistake of one human being?
He taps the odometer shield and the needle swings back to the left. “I simply came to a point one day when I realized that throughout recorded history, the human race has created religion only to relate with an environment of constant death. That’s all there was in the beginning of human time, was death and life. There was no word of god, because first man had to think the word to worship it.”
You finish your Coke and lay the can on the floorboard, asking him to go on. “Well, in the beginning of human worship man was a hunter and the animal, Sun and Moon were the primary objects of worship. This worship of nature was carried through when the cultivation of farming brought with it the worship of the Earth Goddess and eventually the territoriality of the human animal brought about the worship of the tribal war deity, or deities, to allow the mind to relate to the constant invasions by barbarian-nomadic tribes on these farming communities.”
You bring your left leg up on the seat, pulling your right leg over your ankle, accidentally kicking the can of Coke underneath the seat. He continues, “All of these ways of worship eventually merged into one when a system of religious metaphors was set on paper and in the mind. Instead of worshipping a sky-god or the Sun, the human mind began to worship the word and the ritual. As soon as we started to put emphasis on the ritual itself instead of what it was meant to be symbolic of, we became lost to reality. And psychologically as a species, we’ve been trapped at this point of delusion ever since.”
This almost sounds like a school lecture except this time you’re actually creating the conversation in the moment so the learning is immediate in small flashes.
You say, why don’t you write a book or something Joe? I mean you’re a genius, you could go on talk shows and shit, fucking Jerry Springer man!
He laughs and looks seriously at you again; “Do you think that you can teach another human being how to love?” You think about it and say, no I guess not because if you could, then all of these organized religions and nationalistic rituals would have actually helped alleviate human suffering instead of further separating us. He nods approval at your insight. “Now you got some smarts kid.”
You shake your head in disbelief at all that has changed in this two-hour car ride.
You ask how he lives in the world everyday knowing what he knows?
He says, “I do the only thing that I know how to do. I live my life with the people around me. If you’ve got no cracks in the mirror up here,” he points to your head, “then there won’t be any craàks in the reflection out here.”
He gestures to the passing farms in reference to the outside world.
You begin to recover as a few more levels of dust are cleared from your mind.
“Now Crystal, notice that understanding has nothing to do with becoming something better than what you already are, or in being some kind of spiritualistic ideal; the understanding of what it means to be religious has to do with how you relate to another human being in everyday relationship.”
You nod in agreement.
“After all, relationship is the one connecting factor of the human race. Society at its basic level, is the relationship between human beings and if I’m in conflict in my relationship with you, then I’m in conflict with the rest of the world. If I’m separated from you by belief or experience, then we’re all doomed.” He closes his eyes for a moment and then rubs them with his forefinger and thumb.
You ask if he means that if we can sit here and have an open discussion, not just debating with one another and running around circles of logic, but instead actually put our minds together to discover the truth that we all share, that the very nature of suffering in the world around us could change completely?
He nods, “That’s right Crystal, one act without clear reflection is enough to prevent the survival of our species. I know it sounds incredible and overdramatic, but if you really look at the whole thing, and not just superficial but subtly, it all becomes quite interesting and extraordinary.”
You ask what he means, “Crystal I guess what I’m trying to say is that in order to discover the whole truth of the limitation of the mind, you must first become very sensitive to what is false and move from there. Begin with doubt and probe into the complicated nature of your own relationship to life. Oh course, what I’m saying is only a bunch of words if you don’t understand that this isn’t a theory to me, or some philosophy that I learned from a book or in school, this is how I live my life in a world of human suffering!”
You pass the Dayton exit on 75, which means about another 25 minutes until your destination. It has stopped raining and the Sun appears on its front porch of the horizon like some prophet of life who’s lived next door forever. Most of the remaining trip is spent in silence, watching the passing farms grow into golf courses with wealthy communities surrounding them. Joe speaks only once to remark about how golf courses are the biggest waste of real estate. “Golf courses and Cemeteries, I mean Jesus Christ, how outdated is this ritual of burying the dead in metal coffins? Burn those bodies and pour ‘em in the lakes and streams, scatter the ashes in the wind. The Earth needs the phosphorus, sulfur, and carbon. Whatever it is that makes a human being alive has obviously left the body, so why do we worship death instead of life that’s been freed from suffering?”
You don’t answer his question because you realize that there are no answers, none that he would accept and be happy with. There is only silence and the timeless energy that comes out of it. You pull up to your friend’s house. She’s not home from U.C. yet; the thirty-minute commute from downtown Cincinnati to West Chester sometimes stretches itself to an hour and fifteen minutes during rush hour on 75. You get your bag out of the back and as you walk past the passenger window you look inside.
Joe leans across the seat and rolls the window down. “Goodbye Crystal, it was a pleasure to meet you, and thanks for the discussion. It’s not that often that a young person such as yourself is willing to sit down and actually listen to what someone else has to say without trying to prove ‘em wrong right away. Of course, you needed the ride and I needed to vent.”
You laugh and say that it was also your pleasure. You thank him for the ride and everything else, especially the Coke and Butterfinger. You pull another fatty from your pocket and throw it on the seat next to him.
He winks and starts the engine.
The car backs out of the driveway and Joe waves to you as he pulls away, back to his life, back to his quest for perfection in an imperfect world. But in a way, you suppose that he’s found some kind of truth in that imperfection. You try to remember his last name, the next time you’re in a bookstore or library; you want to look his shit up. It was Joseph C-something, oh well. You look up to the sky; it’s both sunny and cloudy in West Chester, Ohio, home of the fighting Thunderbirds. As you walk up to the house, you look down to your pocket and pull out ten hits of recently dipped blotter acid.
You think it’s time to leave the world for a few days.
He leans across the front seat and rolls the window down. “Get in. Throw your bags in the back.” From the back of the green station wagon, you see him run a hand through his gray hair and extinguish a cigarette in the ashtray. You walk to the passenger side and get in. He shakes your hand. “My name is Joseph Cooglias.”
He looks you up and down, you feel as if your clothes are being scanned and catalogued. You are sure that he has noticed your tongue stud and he’ll never see the nipple ring. “You’re not running from the law are you?”
You shake your head and say no, my name is Crystal Noman and I’m just trying to get a ride to Cincinnati. My best friend from high school has Pink Floyd tickets for me, but I have to be there two days ahead to claim them. And since it’s the middle of the week, nobody at school’s leaving till’ the weekend, so I had to hitch. Let me ask you a question, you’re not one of those freakrapist-sickfucker’s that you hear about on the news are you?
He shakes his head, smiles and offers his hand again. His hands are rough with calluses that dig into your own soft skin. When you close the door and roll the window back up, he accelerates slow and smooth back into the traffic of 1-75. No one says a word until the first rest stop. He buys you and himself a Coke and Butterfinger. “Crystal, what are you studying in school?” You look at his face and tell him you’re an economics major with a minor in marketing.
He chuckles inside his mouth without making his obvious condescension into a public statement. Butterfinger crumbles from his mouth and falls into his lap. He brushes it onto the floorboard. “You know what kid, you might as well go buy a safe, lock yourself inside and wait to die.” You recoil in surprise and your face becomes hot, your hands begin to sweat. What the fuck are you talking about mister? student graduating with honors next semester.
He pulls a Marlboro medium from the pack, lights it and rolls the window down halfway. “What I mean Crystal, is that what this world needs today are not pimps and pornographers, but intelligent people that are sensitive enough to free themselves from this nightmare of chaos that the state of the world is in today.”
You ask what he means by pimps and pornographers?
He glances at you serious and pulls a silver flask, engraved with the initials IC, from his jacket pocket. He fills it with a bottle of Jack Daniels that he takes from under the seat. “All advertising art is pornography since it’s intended to make the observer possess the object being represented. A pimp is someone who pushes something on another person by using this pornographic method. Crystal you are in school learning how to be pimp, selling shit to people with pornographic methods and that’s a fact.”
You’re pissed. Your hands clench and sweat more. He takes a drink from the just filled flask and winces, while screwing the top back on. You ask what gives him the right to pass judgement on you. “This isn’t about me Crystal, this is about facts. And the fact is that propaganda and belief rule this melodramatic world of human affairs. Belief is the only thing that could possibly separate the human race.” You cock your head in confusion; the insult is slipping away. You say, what do you mean Joe, there’s lots of things that separate people; things like race, religion, and what economic or political society you belong to?
He laughs, staring at the passing farms. You notice the roof of one barn has a huge rebel flag painted on with a “Member of the Local Klan” sign by the fence in the yard. “Crystal, who or what is it that acknowledges those differences you listed?” His question intrigues you and throws you into a wall at the same time. You say, what do you mean, I’m the one who acknowledges them?”
He puckers his lips and blows a breath of disapproval. “Crystal, were you born knowing how to talk or how to drive a car?” No but I don’t see how that... “That means that not only those differences you listed, but the very way that you think has been acquired by your mind through experience and time. That is the essence of belief. Belief is of the past and the past is experience of suffering, so the mind, acting through experience of the past, carries suffering into the present moment of life.”
You switch your weight to lean against the door. You say, that makes sense but what’s so wrong about it? e takes another drink. “Beliefs separate human beings. The Christians say they believe in God, the Muslims say they believe in God, and the Jews say they believe in God, but at the same time they’re all fighting each other because they each have different metaphors for the same idea.”
You realize that this is correct and you ask if he is an atheist. He shakes his head. “No, I’m a very religious person, but the word God is a belief, an idea that has been created out of fear, and it has been used to exploit people.”
You say, but you do believe that God exists? He looks into your eyes.
“Crystal, whether you believe that God exists or not has absolutely no relevance to the fact that human beings all over the world suffer. You don’t ask if the Sun is shining or if London exists, it’s there, it’s a fact. And as long as one human being on this planet suffers, the word God is an illusion brought about by insecurity and fear.”
You say damn, I guess that means that something’s wrong with the way that human beings think. You look ahead to the stretching highway that lies before you. Clouds are gathering from the south.
He nods his head. “That’s right, children in school aren’t taught how to think, they are taught what to think. Now Crystal, you’ve got to understand before we go any further in this conversation that I’m not trying to prove something to you. I’m not trying to be some damn genius or make you think that I’m this savior come to heal the world or any bullshit like that, I mean heaven knows I have my vices.” He holds the flask up. “I just want to have a discussion with you, as a member of the generation that will inherit control of this ecopoligious madness. I wonder how you, a child of the democratic dream, plan to govern the affairs of this world?”
His long wind stimulates you in a deep place, possibly a door in your mind that you didn’t even know was there.
You nod without expression and enter Joseph’s head. His movements, his gestures, the energy behind his words are tempting your morals, questioning your beliefs, opening you up, perhaps even causing you to consciously mutate into a state of open inquiry. You are completely alive.
He takes another swig from the flask, winces again and offers you some. You refuse and pull a joint out of your own pocket. You push in the car lighter and wait for it to pop. “So, you’re going to see the Floyd huh? I saw them in 77’ at Riverfront Coliseum during the Animals tour. I sat in the fourth row.” Yo ‘re intrigued agaiir this man has to be about fifty years old. You ask what a guy like m was doing at a Pink Floyd concert, mald a mental note that at the time he stated, Roger Waters was still in the band and the Animals album was a concept derived from the George Orwell book Animal Farm. You pass the joint and he takes a hit, holding the smoke in his lungs for a few seconds and then exhales through his nose, dragon-style.
He passes the joint back to you. “When I was a priest, a member of my parish operated the ticket sales for the amphitheater. Now this was back before Ticketmaster made a monopoly on concert sales.”
You’re amazed that this guy used to be a priest, but after a few seconds you see that it fits, but there has to be more to this story.
You look at him closely; his black sport jacket with the flask pocket on the inside, his black suede boots, black silk slacks with business socks and a button up white silk shirt. He has a violent scar running from his ear to his lower chin. He catches you looking.
“I got that in Vietnam. I was a chaplain in the Marine Corps, and the VeeCee attacked our unit in the middle of the night. The soldier that did this told me just before I passed out, that the only reason that he left me alive is because I was a religious man and he considered it a bad omen to kill a holy man the first time they met in combat. The Vietnamese are a very deep and proud people Crystal, but you’d never know that living here in rural Ohio.”
He shakes his head in what appears to be dismay. “You don’t hear much of anything about reality around here.”
In a flash of memory never experienced--you can imagine, you can fantasize and speculate about the miles that this man has walked and the light years he has traveled inside his head. You say, if you don’t mind me asking, why did you leave the priesthood? He clears his throat and looks at you serious again, probably attempting to ascertain if you were ready for what he was about to say.
He puts the roach in his mouth and swallows. “I left because of a difference in expression of belief that I and the Cardinal shared. About twenty years ago at the beginning of the New Year, a young boy in my parish testified in court that the Cardinal had molested him on several occasions during private communion conferences. When I confronted the Cardinal about it, he threw his position in my face, saying that if I understood how much power the Church had in the world, I would keep my mouth shut and help to maintain the integrity of the only institution that keeps order in the midst of chaos.”
His index finger punctures the air as he’s speaking, emphasizing the Cardinal’s blasphemy. You put your own fingers up to your face and rub your lips, the warmth of contact feels good against the cold flesh that this mans story inspires. You ask what happened. He lights another Marlboro and continues, “Well, I told the Cardinal to stick his position up his ass and I testified in court to what he threatened me with. The evidence was only circumstantial, but the Cardinal was still defrocked and banished from the Church. He now rut boein Lexington. I was rewarded for my effort by the Bishop, who I also told to stick it in his ass. It was soon after that I became a freelance writer and that’s what I’ve done ever since, just travel and talk.” He nods, marking the end of his story. He flicks the butt out the window and lights another cigarette, looking at you for your response. You are completely silent.
You just passed the halfway mark of the journey and rain begins to pelt the car in fat droplets that spread across the windshield. You will be approaching Dayton and soon after the ride will end. Now that you’re good and stoned , you can concentrate more on the conversation without regards to the conclusion or the arrival.
You say, Jesus how do you feel now about the Church? He looks down to his lap and brushes the remaining Butterfinger crumbs away, then looks back to the road.
“I've thought about that for many years now, through drug experiments, through drug addictions and through drug withdrawals. I’ve thought about the Church and the Bible through my stages as an alcoholic and a womanizer. And even though I’ve been down, lying in the gutter, soaked with my own vomit, I’ve never been low enough to step one foot back inside a church, mosque, or temple of any kind, and I never will. No matter what drug I’ve been addicted to, no matter how desperate I was for a fix, I always knew that the addiction to religious ritual and metaphor is the deadliest vice a human being can hold! Religion has killed more people than any war, disease or natural disaster ever.”
He puts out the cigarette and you can feel your beliefs begin to smolder and ash.
You stare at nothing, your head swaying to the rhythm of emptiness as it pulses inside you. You feel as if you’ve touched the other side of a mystery beyond comprehension. It’s all one big confusing mess. When you recover, you ask if he still considers himself a religious person.
He smiles and grips the wheel tight. “Yes, but to me the truly religious person isn’t the one who goes to church faithfully and worships some god created by man. To me the religious person is the one who steps completely out of the stream of information. The human being that thinks independently of any system of thought or particular ideology, to me that’s a truly religious person.”
Your thoughts gather and you follow the lead of insight by asking him about people like Adolph Hitler who also stepped out of this so-called stream of belief? “But did Hitler step out of the stream completely, or did he merely change the direction of the stream? If he stepped out completely, then his actions in the world would not have been reflective of securing knowledge or territory, because these are things in the stream of experience called time. Jesus Crystal, Hitler’s not the one you should be scared of, it’s the minds of the automatons that followed him that’s really scary.
You ask how he knows all of this. “Have you ever read Mien Kampf?”
You say no.
“It should be required reading, not for worship, but to understand the mind of a deluded individual. Hitler had a limited vision, he was even a very dogmatic person, but the passion that he developed for ritual is what led to the horror of the holocaust. If no one would have followed Hitler’s lead, he would have been a crazy artist with deluded ideas, and he would have died broke and alone. When you can really see the Nazi ritual that millions of Germans worshipped, you’ll understand what happens when people limit themselves to a particular method of society or system of belief.”
The point is well made and leaves you silent. After a few minutes you look back at him and ask how he compares Nazism with his experience of the Church?
He seems almost surprised at your question and a smile invades his face. “There is no difference at all, only for the historian and the fool.”
You ask him to explain.
“Well, the expression of ritual is superficially different, but the source is still the same, fear. All over the world human beings may have different skin color and come from different environments, but underneath this flesh we are each bundles of skin, nerves, muscles, beliefs, desires, fears and conflicting emotion. We are power hungry security fiends. The frightening thing is that some people are more passionate about their suffering than others and seek to blame something or someone, which leads to exploitation and ultimately to the hiding of truth under the veils of lie and belief, which in my book are the same goddamn thing!”
His hands grip the wheel tighter and the whites of his knuckles are exposed, as what seems to be years of penned up aggression come spewing from his mouth. You can almost feel his frustration as if it was infrared radiation and you were a radio telescope. He needed this conversation as much as you did.
You are aware of his bitterness and ask if he is a pessimist?
He shakes his head, “Oh no, not at all, but I am a fan of the observation of reality. I know now that when I began to understand the limitations of my own mind and I dropped all of the beliefs that I had been taught to cling to for security, that’s when I became a sensitive and therefore a religious human being.”
He nods the release of his personal truth to you.
You ask what he considers to be a sensitiv person?
“To me, a sensitive human being is one that listens very close to what is happening around them. Alert and conscious of everything with the eyes, ears, nerves, senses and the brain operating in the most acute fashion, each alert to the slightest stimulus while at the same time understanding their own limitations. To me, only such a serious mind can understand what truth is and what the meaning behind the metaphor God is!”
There is something so empty in what h&s saying, something so final in his words that it creates a void deep within you, a hole that used to be filled with religious scriptures and belief that has been passed down in your family for generations. All of that false security is burning away and the feeling it leaves can only be described as cold. You say that not all priests rape little children. He was a good priest, so why should he condemn all organized religion for the mistake of one human being?
He taps the odometer shield and the needle swings back to the left. “I simply came to a point one day when I realized that throughout recorded history, the human race has created religion only to relate with an environment of constant death. That’s all there was in the beginning of human time, was death and life. There was no word of god, because first man had to think the word to worship it.”
You finish your Coke and lay the can on the floorboard, asking him to go on. “Well, in the beginning of human worship man was a hunter and the animal, Sun and Moon were the primary objects of worship. This worship of nature was carried through when the cultivation of farming brought with it the worship of the Earth Goddess and eventually the territoriality of the human animal brought about the worship of the tribal war deity, or deities, to allow the mind to relate to the constant invasions by barbarian-nomadic tribes on these farming communities.”
You bring your left leg up on the seat, pulling your right leg over your ankle, accidentally kicking the can of Coke underneath the seat. He continues, “All of these ways of worship eventually merged into one when a system of religious metaphors was set on paper and in the mind. Instead of worshipping a sky-god or the Sun, the human mind began to worship the word and the ritual. As soon as we started to put emphasis on the ritual itself instead of what it was meant to be symbolic of, we became lost to reality. And psychologically as a species, we’ve been trapped at this point of delusion ever since.”
This almost sounds like a school lecture except this time you’re actually creating the conversation in the moment so the learning is immediate in small flashes.
You say, why don’t you write a book or something Joe? I mean you’re a genius, you could go on talk shows and shit, fucking Jerry Springer man!
He laughs and looks seriously at you again; “Do you think that you can teach another human being how to love?” You think about it and say, no I guess not because if you could, then all of these organized religions and nationalistic rituals would have actually helped alleviate human suffering instead of further separating us. He nods approval at your insight. “Now you got some smarts kid.”
You shake your head in disbelief at all that has changed in this two-hour car ride.
You ask how he lives in the world everyday knowing what he knows?
He says, “I do the only thing that I know how to do. I live my life with the people around me. If you’ve got no cracks in the mirror up here,” he points to your head, “then there won’t be any craàks in the reflection out here.”
He gestures to the passing farms in reference to the outside world.
You begin to recover as a few more levels of dust are cleared from your mind.
“Now Crystal, notice that understanding has nothing to do with becoming something better than what you already are, or in being some kind of spiritualistic ideal; the understanding of what it means to be religious has to do with how you relate to another human being in everyday relationship.”
You nod in agreement.
“After all, relationship is the one connecting factor of the human race. Society at its basic level, is the relationship between human beings and if I’m in conflict in my relationship with you, then I’m in conflict with the rest of the world. If I’m separated from you by belief or experience, then we’re all doomed.” He closes his eyes for a moment and then rubs them with his forefinger and thumb.
You ask if he means that if we can sit here and have an open discussion, not just debating with one another and running around circles of logic, but instead actually put our minds together to discover the truth that we all share, that the very nature of suffering in the world around us could change completely?
He nods, “That’s right Crystal, one act without clear reflection is enough to prevent the survival of our species. I know it sounds incredible and overdramatic, but if you really look at the whole thing, and not just superficial but subtly, it all becomes quite interesting and extraordinary.”
You ask what he means, “Crystal I guess what I’m trying to say is that in order to discover the whole truth of the limitation of the mind, you must first become very sensitive to what is false and move from there. Begin with doubt and probe into the complicated nature of your own relationship to life. Oh course, what I’m saying is only a bunch of words if you don’t understand that this isn’t a theory to me, or some philosophy that I learned from a book or in school, this is how I live my life in a world of human suffering!”
You pass the Dayton exit on 75, which means about another 25 minutes until your destination. It has stopped raining and the Sun appears on its front porch of the horizon like some prophet of life who’s lived next door forever. Most of the remaining trip is spent in silence, watching the passing farms grow into golf courses with wealthy communities surrounding them. Joe speaks only once to remark about how golf courses are the biggest waste of real estate. “Golf courses and Cemeteries, I mean Jesus Christ, how outdated is this ritual of burying the dead in metal coffins? Burn those bodies and pour ‘em in the lakes and streams, scatter the ashes in the wind. The Earth needs the phosphorus, sulfur, and carbon. Whatever it is that makes a human being alive has obviously left the body, so why do we worship death instead of life that’s been freed from suffering?”
You don’t answer his question because you realize that there are no answers, none that he would accept and be happy with. There is only silence and the timeless energy that comes out of it. You pull up to your friend’s house. She’s not home from U.C. yet; the thirty-minute commute from downtown Cincinnati to West Chester sometimes stretches itself to an hour and fifteen minutes during rush hour on 75. You get your bag out of the back and as you walk past the passenger window you look inside.
Joe leans across the seat and rolls the window down. “Goodbye Crystal, it was a pleasure to meet you, and thanks for the discussion. It’s not that often that a young person such as yourself is willing to sit down and actually listen to what someone else has to say without trying to prove ‘em wrong right away. Of course, you needed the ride and I needed to vent.”
You laugh and say that it was also your pleasure. You thank him for the ride and everything else, especially the Coke and Butterfinger. You pull another fatty from your pocket and throw it on the seat next to him.
He winks and starts the engine.
The car backs out of the driveway and Joe waves to you as he pulls away, back to his life, back to his quest for perfection in an imperfect world. But in a way, you suppose that he’s found some kind of truth in that imperfection. You try to remember his last name, the next time you’re in a bookstore or library; you want to look his shit up. It was Joseph C-something, oh well. You look up to the sky; it’s both sunny and cloudy in West Chester, Ohio, home of the fighting Thunderbirds. As you walk up to the house, you look down to your pocket and pull out ten hits of recently dipped blotter acid.
You think it’s time to leave the world for a few days.
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