Beats Me Jesus
D.B. Cox • • •
D.K. Blake is fifty-eight and he’s tired—too tired to sleep. D.K. is lying in bed staring up at a motionless ceiling fan. He has been stretched out here since early this morning trying to conjure a reason to move.
Things are screwed up—have been for a long while now. D.K. is now ready to own up to the crimes that have left him here-ready to admit how at each crossroads, he chose this way, toward this place.
Nothing adds up anymore. Borrow one here, carry one there—a million calculations never satisfied. D.K. lives in his anti-world of negative space, unwilling to move toward a world of comfortable clichés. A lifetime spent, futilely searching for the imagined self he wanted to become.
D.K.’s eyes move down to the picture tacked on the inside of the bedroom door. It’s a picture of Jesus. He found the flyer tucked inside his front door screen last Saturday. It’s one of those bible scenes where Jesus is standing with his arms raised, palms toward the sky. There are some small children in the foreground, and the caption at the bottom says, “Suffer the little children to come unto me.” But the thing D.K. likes about the picture, the thing that makes him smile, is that Jesus looks like he’s shrugging his shoulders, as if he’s saying, “beats the hell out of me”. That’s the reason he nailed it to the door. Good old “beats me Jesus”.
D.K. likes Jesus because Jesus was a sharp guy— became a legend by playing his cards right. He toured the countryside for a while, making a name for himself, then got the hell out. He went from Jesus to Christ in thirty years or so. Jesus knew you had to do it while you were still young, or else suicide, even altruistic suicide didn’t mean a goddamn thing. Just like Jimi and Janis and that Cobain guy, you have to seal the deal before you get old and fat—make a dramatic exit while it still means something. Don’t stay around long enough to fuck it all up.
You take Elvis. Elvis held on too long. These days, when you think of Elvis, all you can picture in your head is “Vegas Elvis”—a fat impostor with dyed black hair wearing a gigantic jump suit singing “Hunk of Burning Love.” Or maybe “Graceland Elvis,” lying dead on his bathroom floor like a beached whale. Yeah, timing is everything when it comes to feeding the legend.
D.K. stares into the too-blue eyes of Jesus and, in a barely audible voice, says, “So tell me, does your old man really mark the fall of every sparrow?”
The paper Savior just hangs there—helpless hands in the air—totally mystified.
The mailman is rattling around the front door--trying to stuff more crap in a mailbox that’s already overflowing with bad news. Ominous documents like the eviction notice that D.K. glanced at last week and jammed back in the box. Bills and threats--the only mail he gets these days. They all want their money, and nobody cares about you or your situation. They don’t give a rat’s ass if you’re out panhandling the street and have a wife in the whorehouse. There’s no excuse for being late with a payment.
D.K. rolls over onto his side. On the nightstand, there’s a photo of him and his ex-wife. They’re standing beside an orange and white U-Haul van, smiling, still young, back before either of them knew anything about distance. Next to the frame, there’s an empty plastic water bottle. He tries to remember just when and why it was that people stopped trusting the local water supply. When he was a kid they all drank the water right out of the spigot—even kept a pitcher of cold water in the refrigerator. Now everybody has to have water with exotic names. Clean water, bottled in clear plastic that comes from hidden springs high up in a mountain somewhere. Some place far away from factories and mills or anything else that might fuck with the purity.
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