Doomed

^{DECEMBER 21, 8:44 A.M. EST} A World of Boors

Gentle Tweeter,

Imagine a world where everyone goes about their daily lives with the absolute certainty that he or she is going to Heaven. Everyone has guaranteed salvation. This is the Earth to which I have returned. From room 6314 of the Rhinelander, I follow my derelict guide. Mr. Crescent City, he carries no luggage. With his every shambling footfall crumbs of shattered glass drop from his clothes, but he doesn’t appear to have a cut or scratch after crushing the coffee table. As the elevator arrives at the lobby and the doors slide open, a waiting guest stands aside for us to exit. Nodding politely, this stranger says, “Eat shit, asswipe.”

In response Crescent makes a little bow and says, “A merry faggot, cunt, nigger to you, too.” And he spits a great wad of saliva on the stranger’s shoes.

This is all my parents’ doing! I should’ve known they couldn’t keep their big traps shut. I’m willing to bet that the moment my mom was off the long-distance call with me she was telling her publicist to announce a press conference. No doubt she and my dad have been tirelessly disseminating the advice I gave them for getting to “Heaven.” The Rhinelander lobby, once a sanctuary of reserved conduct and politely hushed discourse, has become a reeking locker room of stale vapors and toilet talk.

In jarring contrast, everyone’s beaming. You’ve never seen so many people so happy. The guests, the concierges, the doormen, they wear the faces of joyous potty-mouthed children. As they glance at one another, theirs are the guileless, loving eyes of Renaissance cherubs gazing in adoration upon the Christ child. The desk clerk greets us with a smile so broad it suggests she’s paid by the tooth. Her eyes shine with genuine rapture as she says, “How was your butt-fucking, dick-sucking stay, Mr. City?”

Crescent returns the rapturous smile, saying, “Fucking great, fuck you, you cunt lapper.”

The clerk confirms that his room is being billed to Camille and Antonio Spencer. She accepts his room key and pleasantly asks, “It looks like your shit-eating car and jungle-bunny driver are waiting. Can I help you with any bullshit fucking, queer-bait thing else?”

“No, thank you,” says Crescent. He shoves a hand into the front pocket of his tattered jeans and drags out some paper money. Between his drug-trembling fingers is a hundred-dollar bill. He folds this under his nose and blows it full of snot as if it were a tissue. Crescent hands this revolting cash across the desk to the clerk, telling her, “Why don’t you finger this up your backside?”

Her smile couldn’t be brighter as the clerk accepts the money and says, “I’ll see you in Heaven, shit-for-brains.”

“Kike,” Crescent says gaily as he turns to leave.

Her voice trilling like a bird, the clerk calls after him, “Have a nice day, you butt-sucking turd.”

A smiling bellman holds open the street door, tipping his cap smartly and bidding us, “Suck it, you stinking crap sandwich.”

Crescent City palms the kid another snot-smeared C-note.

At the curb, a uniformed chauffeur holds open the door of a gleaming Town Car and asks, “To the airport, Mr. Jizz Guzzler?” The chauffeur is, as the desk clerk mentioned, of African descent. They shake hands amiably.

Settling himself in the backseat, Crescent says, “Yes, the domestic terminal, please, my porch-monkey friend.”

Their bubbly, laughing conversation continues in this wretched vein all the way to the curb at the airport. No one takes offense. No slur seems to be off-limits. Even the people we drive past, walking on the sidewalks, seated in other cars, they all smile blissfully, as if immune to insults. If they catch Crescent’s eye they smile and flip him a middle finger. The honking horns are deafening. The toothy smiles are blinding. Everyone is gloriously Heaven-bound, but only if they swear sufficiently.

Behind the wheel, the driver sneaks out a cloud of intestinal foulness, instantly filling the car with the fetid reek of his stagnant entrails.

“Good one!” Crescent City says, inhaling deeply. “The angel Madison must really love you.”

“It’s the smell of salvation, brother,” replies the driver. “Breathe it up!”

In the airport terminal we pass a newsstand. The headline on the cover of Newsweek says, “A Rude Religious Revolution: The Boorists Have Arrived!” Time magazine announces: “The %&!?//$ Road to Redemption.” On a television monitor mounted near the ceiling of the concourse a CNN news presenter says, “Boorists now claim their messiah has been resurrected….”

As we walk toward our gate of departure, my chubby ham-hock legs hurry to keep pace with his long, zombie stride. Loping along, of course he can’t hear me, not while he’s sober, but he maintains a steady patter. To everyone in the airport he must look like an untreated schizophrenic, his not-clean shirt flapping open and untucked. Not that anyone seems upset by the sight of a lunatic dressed in rags yammering to himself. No, now that humanity is assured a permanent seat at the right hand of God, they’re grinning with glee. Their eyes are misted with righteousness.

“Your timing, little dead girl, could not have been better,” says Crescent. “We have bullshit laws about driving sober and laws about always wearing shoes and not owning giant boa constrictors, only we didn’t have laws about the most important stuff: getting saved.” He says, “People were starving to know those rules.”

This new religion, Boorism, makes death look like an all-expenses-paid luxury vacation that lasts until the end of time.

“You created world peace! Nobody’s a gay anymore, or a Jew or a person from Africa,” he rants, forging ahead. “Look at us! We’re all ‘Boors’!”

It’s simple, explains Crescent City. My parents staged a massive publicity campaign to announce that their dead daughter had contacted them from beyond the grave. They told the world that I was now an angel in Heaven, rubbing elbows with the Kennedy brothers and Amy Winehouse, and I had bestowed upon them a fail-safe, surefire blueprint for attaining salvation. They issued a blitz of press releases to blab that I was within the pearly gates, riding a cloud and strumming a harp. Ridiculous as this sounds, this is the milieu of Camille and Antonio.

“Boorism isn’t the real name for our faith,” Crescent says. “That’s just a phony label the media vultures invented to pigeonhole us. Officially we refer to ourselves as apostles of Madlantis.”

Realistically I can’t slight my folks for getting so excited. Their previous theology of “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” must’ve offered scant emotional comfort in the face of their only child being killed on her birthday. Yes, I expired on my birthday in an erotic-asphyxiation scenario that shames me to revisit here.

This is the death of angst. Forget Nietzsche. Forget Sartre. Existentialism is dead. God has been resurrected, and people have a road map for attaining glorious immortality. In Boorism, everyone who’d abandoned religion now has a path by which to return to God, and that feels… great. Just look at their strolling, patient gaits. In light of this new salvation, mortal life feels like the final day of school.

It’s not the threat of Hell or jail or societal shunning that’s brought this bliss. It’s the complete assurance of paradise. It makes the inevitability of death shine like a final cosmic Friday preceding an infinite party weekend in Mazatlán.

As we wait in the jetway, Crescent says, “In Heaven the first thing I’m getting myself is a new liver. And a new body, and hair like I used to have.” Clutching his boarding pass, he says, “I swear, once I’m in Heaven I’m never touching drugs. Never again.”

“Amen,” a voice says. It’s a woman standing behind us in line. She’s shouldering a tote bag and thumbing the buttons of a PDA as she says, “In Heaven I’m eating steak and fries for every meal, and I’m still never weighing more than one hundred fifteen, maximum.”

“Amen,” says another voice waiting in line.

“In Heaven,” says another voice, farther back in the jetway, “I’m going to reestablish contact with my kids and give them the kind of father those good kids deserve.”

“Hallelujah!” someone shouts. Several “Praise bes” echo in the narrow jetway space. With that, everyone in line volunteers his or her aspirations for eternity.

“After I go to be with God, I’m going to finish high school.”

“My car in Heaven is going to be bigger than anything you’ve ever seen.”

“When I die, I’m asking for a dick bigger than your car!” someone spits.

Aboard the plane, in the first-class section, Crescent City finds our seats. He says, “You want the window or the aisle? I bought two tickets.” He waits as if for me to choose. “I’ll be right back,” he says, and goes up to the toilet.

I take the window. The flight attendant makes an announcement. “As we prepare for takeoff, please fasten your fucking seat belts and make sure your cocksucking seat backs are in the full upright and locked position….” The passengers laugh and applaud. Before the flight crew has finished its safety announcement, the familiar translucent form of Crescent City’s spirit comes walking back down the airplane aisle and takes the aisle seat next to mine. His body must be near overdosed on ketamine, still occupying the locked toilet cubicle.

Watery, clear like a prism, but suggesting every color in the spectrum, the ghost smiles at me and says, “I can’t wait to be an angel like you.” At the front of the cabin, the flight crew is knocking, soon pounding at the locked bathroom door. Oblivious, Crescent’s ghost asks me, “So, what was Heaven really like?”