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  To the memory of my good friend and boyhood bandmate: Darryl Cotton

  Horatio

  My first memory: at the callow and impressionable-as-warm-wax age of three I’m sitting on the floor of my parents’ bedroom gazing at my mother as she dolls herself up on what must have been a Sunday morning. I’m vaguely aware that her destination is a place she calls “church,” but I’m too young to comprehend the judgmental, exclusionary, and ironically un-Christlike aspects of her particular tribe of Christians. So I’m enjoying watching her play dress-up.

  Strange and beautiful birds I later recognize as doves hoot plaintively just outside the window while she tricks herself out for Jesus. Translucent nylon hose crackle and sizzle with static electricity as they are drawn up over still-firm thighs. Her “good” dress seems to dance with her as she shimmies into it. She applies wine-red lipstick with stunning skill (I can’t even keep my crayons inside the lines yet) and layers row upon row of faux pearls deftly around her slender throat—a throat I will eventually want to wrap my hands around and squeeze until her bouffant explodes, which I’ll resist doing only with the utmost self-restraint. She sings beguiling hymns while she primps, as my toy robots and I watch openmouthed and spellbound from the floor.

  My little soul is pining for the day when I am “a big boy” and she will allow me to accompany her to “God’s house.” I’m thinking it must be a pretty sweet place to make her whip out her party dress. It probably has a pool. With a slide.

  So this as-yet-unsullied goddess becomes my earliest paragon of sexuality and organized religion. I’m still years away from understanding the scope of its hold on me, and I don’t realize I could go to Hades-for-ankle-biters just for having amorphous, erotic notions about my own mother as she ardently tarts herself up for the Lord. But it’s no surprise that this powerful memory is the first one my baby brain grabs hold of. It’s clearly a keeper.

  The scorching intersection of sex and religion will remain a potent one for me—a mash-up that will drive me to my inevitable destiny in the years ahead . . . possibly. Did God set me up? Or did I arrive at my ultimate future under my own steam? Free will or fated? It’s a tough one to call. All I can say is that at this stage of my currently imploding adult life, the last person I ever expected to have a direct line to was mom’s superhero, Big “G,” little “o,” “d,” who, until recently, has seemed content to sit out the duration of my life, ignoring my occasional eleventh-hour invocations and foxhole prayers—almost daring me to become an atheist. But one dark, lonely night, that is exactly who I find myself calling. Literally. On my cell phone.

  And so it is written:

  1-800-Call God

  Bobby

  (Beep, beep, beep, beep, blippity, beep, blip, beep, blippity, blip, beep!)

  “Hello?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Helloooooooo!”

  “Uh . . . yeah,. . . . God?”

  “Yepper.”

  “Oh, great—God says ‘yepper’? What is this? An 800 number that sells salvation for five easy payments of nine ninety-five?”

  “Ixnay on the amscay.”

  “ ‘Yepper’ and Pig Latin? You sound like a geek. I’m betting there’s a bad haircut and a Star Trek T-shirt on your end of the line, yes?”

  “You lost me.”

  “Ditto. So I’m supposed to believe this is God’s personal line?”

  “Probably not. But there isn’t very much you believe in at this point in your life, is there?”

  “That’s a pretty large claim, considering you don’t even know who I am.”

  “I know who you are.”

  “Well, that just sounds creepy. Like you’ve been spying on me or something.”

  “Trust me, you walking to the corner Starbucks every night to buy a ham-and-Swiss panini and a grande chai latte is hardly surveillance-worthy.”

  “The fuck . . . ?!”

  “And that barista is married, dude. You don’t stand a chance.”

  “Wha—Who the hell is this?”

  “You should know. You called me.”

  “How do you . . . ?”

  “How do I . . . ?”

  “Is this somebody I know?”

  “I like to think so. Shall we move on?”

  “How . . . okay . . . so, God, what’s up?”

  “Certainly not your prospects. Hence the call.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What can I do ya for?”

  “Wait a second . . . Doug?”

  “It’s not Doug.”

  “That’s totally the kind of thing Doug would say.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “And how would you know that?”

  “I’m omniscient.”

  “This is Doug?”

  “Not Doug.”

  “Who the hell is this?”

  “You’ve already asked me that. Do you want something?”

  “Yes, I want to know who this is. If I’m actually talking to God, prove it.”

  “Look, you called me, and you’ve just wasted a minute-eighteen of your time and mine. Do you have an actual question?”

  “Yes. Prove to me you’re really God.”

  “That’s not a question. It’s more like a command.”

  “What is this? What’s the point of this phone number?”

  “A minute twenty-six.”

  “This is bullshit . . . I’m hanging up.”

  “Okey-dokey.”

  “You know what’s weird? I actually called with half a hope that this number was . . . real. Isn’t that funny? Joke’s on me.”

  “I’m not laughing. You’ve come this far. Sort of. Why not play along?”

  “Play along . . . yeah, okay. I’ve got no one else to talk to tonight, what the hell? My life’s in the crapper anyway and ready to be flushed. I’m done. I was going to off myself but I’d probably screw that up too. Wind up a vegetable. Bok choy in a bed. So I was hoping, if maybe this hotline was real, that God might be persuaded to whack me.”

  “Whack you?”

  “Yepper! Whack me. Or smite me. His call.”

  “Has life gotten a bit tough for you, little buddy?”

  “To put it freakin’ mildly, yes.”

  “Boo-hoo.”

  “Well, whoever you are, you’re doing a pretty good riff on God’s general disregard for me and my life.”

  “Hang on, let me go get my violin.”

  “Yeah, I’ve often thought if God does exist he must be a bit of a dick, anyway.”

  “A dick?”

  “What kind of God would sit back and let the world be as fucked up as it is?”

  “Let me guess . . . a dick?”

  “Exactly. So if God’s too apathetic—”

  “Too much of a dick.”

  “Stop interrupting. Too much of a dick to put me out of my misery for my own sake, why can’t He just smite me for my sins? I understand He loves doing that.”

  “Whoa, so backing up here, you want God—who you believe is responsible for the effed-up state of your planet—to now smite you for your sins?”

  “That’s what God does, amigo.”

  “No, it’s not!”

  “Well, yeah it is.”

  “Well, no it’s not.”

  “Then what’s all that ‘thunderbolt and lightning’ stuff in the Old Testament?”

  “Did you just quo
te Freddie Mercury?”

  “What?”

  “Skip it.”

  “I think we’re getting off topic.”

  “Why don’t you try switching your own motor off? Just give it a shot, so to speak. Thousands of unhappy customers have and done it quite successfully.”

  “What kind of advice is that, if you’re supposed to be God?”

  “Don’t answer a question with a question.”

  “Now you just sound like my mother. This isn’t my mother, is it?”

  “Your mother’s dead.”

  “How—Who the . . . ?! This is Doug, you bastard! How are you doing this?”

  “Again, not Doug.”

  “Who is this? . . . How do you know me?”

  “I know you.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Yeah-ha.”

  “Na-ah.”

  “Yeah-ha.”

  “You sound like some kid in grade school.”

  “Thank you. I love kids.”

  “This is going nowhere. I think I’m gonna jump off.”

  “A building?”

  “I’m afraid of heights. So, what, you write this number all over town to see how many suckers will call? You must be pretty lonely. We’re just two lonely, depressed people, whadya say?”

  “Is that what you think is going on here?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “You need to widen your view. Remember when you were thirteen and you hid in the girls’ locker room and watched the volleyball team while they were changing? It shifted your perspective a little, didn’t it, and—”

  “Holy shit! God! . . . Whoa! How do you know about that?!”

  “Did you just say ‘Holy shit’ and ‘God’ in the same sentence?”

  “How could you possibly know that? I never told anyone. Okay, you got my attention.”

  “Yippee. At last.”

  “Wow.”

  “Took you long enough.”

  “How could you know all this?”

  “One more time: I’m omniscient.”

  “Okay, okay—give me a second here. But this is just some phone number I found in a . . . on a bathroom stall in a bar.”

  “Ah . . . no, you didn’t.”

  “But—”

  “You didn’t get it at any bar. In an act of desperation, you bought—correction—you stole a self-help book called Magnificent Vibration. This number was written on the inside front cover. In pencil.”

  “Motherfucker!”

  “I’ll smite you for that!”

  “This is crazy! Really? . . . GOD?”

  “It takes you people a while, doesn’t it?”

  “Okay, see, you do smite. You just said so.”

  “That was a joke. I don’t really go round eliminating folks just because they piss themselves, or me, off.”

  “You said, ‘don’t really.’ That sounds a little iffy to me. Like there’s some wiggle room.”

  “Not so much.”

  “Well, that totally sounds like there’s wiggle room.”

  “Look, once again, I think you’re focusing on the wrong thing. Anyway, I let Adolf Hitler live and he killed millions.”

  “But you took him out him eventually.”

  “No, I didn’t. He killed himself. And not before he murdered most of the Chosen and picked a fight with half the world. What about Pol Pot and Stalin? Ivan the Terrible, Ted Bundy? So how can I justify dispatching depressed little Bunkie, just because you got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, and leave all those other ass-clowns alone?”

  “ ‘Ass-clowns’? . . . Is this really God?”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Well, you should know if I’m kidding you or not, right?”

  “I was being facetious, and can you stop testing me now, goddamnit?!”

  “God says ‘goddamnit’?”

  “Occasionally. When it’s warranted.”

  “That’s like me saying ‘Bobdamnit!’ ”

  “Your name’s not Bob.”

  “I’m—”

  “Horatio.”

  “Ahhh, I hate that name!”

  “Then that would be ‘Horatiodamnit.’ ”

  “I got the crap beat out of me in junior high because of that godawful name . . . sorry, that slipped out.”

  “So you changed it to ‘Bob’?”

  “My mother was a European-history freak. Horatio—”

  “Nelson, yes, I’m familiar with him.”

  “Yeah, I guess you are.”

  “Very famous eighteenth-century naval hero. Napoleonic wars, Battle of Trafalgar and all that.”

  “That’s great, so let’s name our only son after some old Limey sailor so he can get the daily crap kicked out of him by Steve the Jock when little Horatio joins the hormone-hell known as junior high.”

  “Good call on your mother’s part.”

  “What?”

  “Naming you Horatio.”

  “What?”

  “It builds character.”

  “What?!”

  “You might not be at the point you’re at if you’d stuck with Horatio.”

  “WHAT?!!”

  “Okay, you’re gonna need to give me more back than that.”

  “I don’t even understand why you’re saying all this to me.”

  “We’ll come back to it.”

  “Look, I just called—”

  “—‘to say . . . I love you.’ Stevie Wonder, ladies and gentlemen.”

  “Do you have ADD? I called this number in a last-ditch hope that this was God and that you could conceivably offer a little advice or guidance. But obviously that’s not what you do, so maybe you could see your way clear to offing me in a not-too-unpleasant manner . . . a quick, painless cancer possibly, or a sudden careening car . . . something short and swift that’ll take me out of my sorry existence, because I’m at the end and I really don’t have the balls to do it myself!”

  “ ‘I just called . . . to say how much I care.’ ”

  “Will you stop singing?”

  “Let’s go back to ‘What?’ I think I liked that better.”

  “What?”

  “Exactly. Go out to a nice bar and have a drink and a pizza.”

  “That’s all you’ve got to say?”

  “Good night, Horatio?”

  “FUCKIT!!”

  (End call)

  Crap! What did I just do? Did I just hang up on God? Seriously? Could it really have been the God, big “G,” little “o,” “d”? If it was, I am so screwed. No, wait; maybe it’s a good thing. Maybe he’ll be angry and wrathful with all that dark, festering biblical shit that I just know is in there and he will toast me. But if he’s really pissed, he might do it in a vengeful, Jehovah/Old Testament kind of way . . . with serpents and locusts or raining frogs and boils, or maybe he’ll kill my first-born male child, if I had a first-born male child, which I’m pretty sure I don’t, but if I did and God killed the little guy, I’d never really know about it because I don’t even know if I have a little guy in the first place. I realize the bizarre call has not only shaken me, it seems to have eighty-sixed my desire to leave this world. At least for now.

  I’m also suddenly really hungry. And pizza’s not a terrible idea. Good recommendation from the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

  It’s eleven o’clock at night. I’m thirty-two, newly divorced, I hate my job, my boss is possibly Voldemort’s fatter, dumber brother, I’m alone in my new post-annulment digs at 1216 N. Detroit Ave. Apt 213, Hollywood, CA 90069, pining for someone to shave my shoulders and love me (not necessarily in that order), feeling desperately sorry for myself and thinking I just had a chat with the Almighty.

  Maybe I’m a bit too baked. Since the divorce, I’ve somewhat fallen back into the old high school habit of lighting one up every now and then. That coupled with the mental distress of my increasingly crappy job.

  My career as a sound editor at a mind-numbingly underwhelming audio/video company
that has cornered the market on dubbing bad Cambodian gangster movies into English is something I have fallen into after the rock star, Nobel prize–winning scientist, and gigolo options failed to pan out. Who watches these highly unpleasant videos in English is beyond me. Apart from the occasional kick-ass fight scene, they’re awful: the acting is usually atrocious and the dialog and story lines in general suck a very large and blood-engorged Cambodian elephant dick, if you’ll pardon the expression. I dislike both the product and my job. It’s vapid, thankless work, made even more distasteful by my sociopath of a boss who everyone covertly calls ‘The Right Whale.’ And not just because he clocks in at three hundred and fifty big ones, either. He has this disgusting biological anomaly that causes tiny balls of white, cheesy stuff he apparently secretes to hang in the corners of his mouth and stick to both his lips with a surprising elasticity when he talks, causing them to look very much like the baleen of the aforementioned marine mammal. Fucking gross.

  The Right Whale actually doesn’t figure very heavily in my story, but for his relatively small footprint, he’s managed to inject an inordinate amount of misery into my life.

  I lost my dog in the divorce. My dog, mind you. I was okay with losing the car, the tiny house, most of the hard-earned cash (though honestly there wasn’t enough left to feed the goldfish—which she also took—once the lawyers had smelled blood, gone into a feeding frenzy, and sharked down all they could chew). But Murray was mine. Why did she have to take him? Well, I know why. Because he was mine, and I wanted him. She doesn’t even like dogs—but she apparently had squatter’s rights on anything she wanted. Including Murray. I have a vague idea of stealing him back at some point, though I’m a little sketchy on the details. I think I’m hoping Murray will come up with an actual plan. He always was good at breaking out of the house, and I’m trusting that with the aid of that innate global-positioning device dogs are supposed to have hardwired into their brains, he’ll somehow show up on my doorstep one sweet day. I miss him.

  I look at my cell phone. It looks at back me. The wacky conversation I just had replays itself in sound bites inside my head. I felt like I was talking to a really well-educated nine-year-old. I hit redial. My hand is actually trembling. Yeah, I definitely need some Taco Bell or Subway.