Chapter 19

Before this plane goes down or before the flight recorder tape runs out, some other mistakes I want to clean up include the following: The Peace of Mind television show The Tender Branson Dashboard Statuette The board game Bible Trivia. As if anything God says is trivial.

The secret the agent told me was to have a lot of things in the pipeline. That way, when one failed you always have hope. So there was: The Bible Diet The book Money-Making Secrets of the Bible The book Sex Secrets of the Bible The Bible Book of Remodeling Kitchens and Bathrooms There was the Tender Branson Room Freshener. There was the Genesis Campaign. There was the Book of Very Common Prayer, Volume II, but the prayers were getting a little witchy: For example, The Prayer to Make Someone Love You. Or, The Prayer to Strike Your Enemy Blind. All of these are brought to you by the good people of Tender Branson Enterprises. None of them was my idea. The Genesis Campaign was the most not my idea. I fought the Genesis Campaign tooth and nail. The problem was, there were people asking if I was a virgin. Intelligent people were asking if it wasn’t a little demented, my still being a virgin at my age. People were asking, what was my problem with sex? What was wrong with me? The Genesis Campaign was the agent’s quick fix. More and more everything in my life was a fix for an earlier fix for an earlier fix until I forget what the original problem was. The problem in this case was you just can’t be a middle-aged virgin in America without something being wrong with you. People can’t conceive of a virtue in someone else that they can’t conceive in themselves. Instead of believing you’re stronger, it’s so much easier to imagine you’re weaker. You’re addicted to self-abuse. You’re a liar. People are always ready to believe the opposite of what you tell them. You’re not just self-controlled. You were castrated as a child. The Genesis Campaign was a very iffy media event. The quick fix was the agent decided to get me married. The agent tells me this, riding in the limo one day. Riding with us, the personal trainer tells me that tiny insulin needles are best because they don’t snag against the inside of the vein. The publicist is there too, and she and the agent look out the tinted windows while the trainer sharpens a needle against the scratch pad of a matchbook and shoots me up with 50 milligrams of Laurabolin. This doesn’t not hurt, using insulin needles. The thing about sex, the agent tells me, is no matter how much you crave it, you can forget. Back when he was a teenager, the agent developed an allergy to milk. He used to love milk, but he couldn’t drink it. Years later, they developed lactose-free milk he can drink, but now he hates the taste of milk. When he quit drinking alcohol because of a kidney problem, he thought he’d go crazy. Now he never thinks about having a drink. To keep me from wrinkling the skin on my face, the team dermatologist has injected most of the muscles around my mouth and eyes with Botox, the botulinum toxin, to paralyze these muscles for the next six months. With the peripheral paresthesia side effects of all my drug interactions, I can hardly feel my hands and feet. With the Botox injections, I can barely move my face. I can talk and smile, but only in a very limited way. This is in the limo going to the plane going to the next stadium, God knows where. According to the agent, Seattle is just the general geographic area around the Kingdome. Detroit is the people who live around the Silverdome. We’re never going to Houston, we’re going to the Astrodome. The Superdome. The Mile High Stadium. RFK Stadium. Jack Murphy Stadium. Jacobs Field. Shea Stadium. Wrigley Field. All of these places have towns, but that doesn’t matter. The events coordinator is riding with us also, and gives me a list of names, applicants, women who want to marry me, and the agent gives me a list of questions to memorize. At the top of the page, the first question is: “What woman in the Old Testament did God turn into a condiment?” The events coordinator is planning a big romantic wedding on the fifty-yard line during Super Bowl halftime. The wedding colors will depend on which teams make it to the Super Bowl. The religion will depend on the bidding war, a very hush-hush bidding war going on for me to convert to Catholic or Jewish or Protestant now that the Creedish church is belly-up. The second question on the list is: “What woman in the Old Testament was eaten by dogs?” The other option the agent is considering is that we avoid the middle man and found our own major religion. Establish our own brand recognition. Sell direct to the customer. The third question on the list is: “Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?” In the limo, the six or seven of us sit facing each other on two bench seats with our knees mixed together between us. According to the publicist, the wedding is set. A committee has already chosen a good nondenominational bride so my asking the questions will be a fake. The committee is in the limo with us. People are mixing drinks at the wet bar and passing them to each other. The bride is going to be the woman just hired as assistant .events coordinator. She’s in the limo with us, sitting in the seat across from me, and she leans forward. Hi, she says. And she’s sure we’ll be very happy together. The agent says, we need a big miracle to do at the wedding. The publicist says, the biggest. The agent says I need to come up with the biggest miracle of my career. With Fertility pissed at me, with my brother still at large, with the Laurabolin needled into my bloodstream, the dating game scheme for choosing a sacred vessel, the Genesis Project, the complete stranger here to marry and deflower me, and the pressure for me to commit suicide, I don’t know what. The undersecretary to the media coordinator says we’re out of vodka. He’s in the limo with us. We’re out of white wine, too. We have loads of tonic water. Everybody looks at me. No matter how much I do, they still want more, better, faster, different, newer, bigger. Fertility was right. And now the agent’s telling me I need the biggest miracle of my career. He says, “You need to get to completion on this.” Amen, I tell him. No kidding.