Grace Page 32 4/1/2010
All Daddy Done Left Me Was the Pawn Ticket for the Holy Grail
by Michael P. Grace III
“Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”
Patti Smith “Gloria”
Copyright 2006, all rights reserved.
Part I
Full Metal Straitjacket
“Problems we all got. It‘s the solutions that scare me.”
An anonymous Jewish alcoholic
Chapter 1
The hull dimensions of a modern wide-bodied jet are virtually identical to those of an ancient Greek galley. In an airbus Ulysses might have been able to do some serious damage all over the world instead of rape, loot, and pillaging or just generally having a good time around the Mediterranean Ocean and points East. Be that historical trivia as it may very well be, within the last 3,000 years the accommodations and food aboard high speed conveyances haven’t improved significantly, if at all. So I was quite thankful that there was no line at passport control. A drop-dead gorgeous officer wearing a khaki blouse, skirt, and a gold wedding ring to match her rank bars was sitting in an open cubicle. Taking my passport she inquired, “Why are you visiting Israel?”
“I came to see Professor Abecassis, the world’s only expert in medieval Ladino documents.”
She was entirely unimpressed and let it show with a monotone, “Where do you plan to stay while here?”
I mumbled under my breath, “I suppose your place is out of the question?”
The officer reached for something in her desk. Before she could shoot me or summon a team of commandos wearing crash proof Mickey Mouse hats sans ears to come and beat me senseless with sticks, I blurted, “Don’t really know. His office is in Jerusalem.”
She looked ready to immediately consign me to the nether regions of bureaucracy just beyond the passport guard boxes. There, what appeared to be family of gypsies decked out as Orthodox Jews was stuck in a seemingly eternal limbo of jet lag and stale sweat. “Did you say East Jerusalem?”
Remembering something about East Jerusalem being predominantly Arab, I got worried. “What’s the difference? Are there two Jerusalems? Who cares if there are three Jerusalems so long as all the girls are as pretty as you.”
She smiled beautifully and stamped my passport. “Have a nice stay.”
I walked into a huge cavern crowded with a jostling polyglot leavened by a small variety of Middle Eastern costumes. Until then I had been amazed by the lack of people. I found EuroCar, where a homely redhead handled my rental paperwork. Prior to seeing her, and hoping that I would get the other girl at the counter, I was beginning to worry that all the women in Israel might be pretty and my life wasted upon other shores. The poor thing—beauty may be only skin-deep, but ugly runs bone deep. Trying to make conversation, while not looking at her, I asked what a clutch of bearded Orthodox guys were doing off to one side bowing and scraping in some ritual possibly connected to the startling sunset outside. She replied, “Ignore them. We do.”
At the parking lot the attendant gave me directions to King George Street in Tel Aviv in answer to my inquiry about things nocturnal. Though he was extremely helpful, his manner of speaking was identical to that of a drill sergeant on the job.
The next day, upon arriving at what I assumed to be North or possibly Mid-Western Jerusalem, I cursed myself for renting a car instead of just paying for a taxi, no matter how exorbitant that might have been. The twisting narrow, congested lanes wouldn’t serve as decent alleyways back home in Texas. But at least they drove on the right side.
After driving in circles for about an hour, I came upon a group of young hitchhikers at a bus stop. I told the crowd my destination and a pair of skinny, swarthy teenagers in olive drab uniforms toting assault rifles climbed in the car. What I couldn’t figure out was what they did with all the bodies when these punks got drunk on the weekend. To the best of my meager knowledge on the subject a couple dozen high velocity, full metal jacket, ball rounds suffice to ruin anyone’s night on the town. In Texas every bar has a sign posted in plain sight describing the mandatory jail sentence of five years for packing in a pub. What a fresh-faced inmate of Huntsville Texas State Prison, consequently get packed is best left unmentioned.
The two kids were Russians, but spoke enough English to cheerily describe the brand names and qualities of the dream cars they planned to buy after moving on to the USA. My command of their mother tongue is limited to: da, nyet, Smirnoff and davai pizdu, which means “give me pussy,” and not all appropriate in this situation. Mostly by means of sign language the hitchhikers led me to within a block of Professor Abecassis’s office. They bailed out laughing about the relative merits of a Mustang versus a Corvette.
If only the two kids were mature enough to realize that parking either set of wheels in that neighborhood would be impossible and hard enough to do with a donkey much less a subcompact rental car. I didn’t see anything resembling a “No Crucifix Parking” sign and by some miraculous means managed to parallel park mine. Your average Wahabi or Shia-ite Baptist back home would barbecue me up in a New York second for having had such a blasphemous misconception of a car, which for them is strictly limited to transportation and occasional mating purposes.
Despite my tardiness, professor Abecassis was friendly when he greeted me in his musty office. “So after all that e-mail business we finally meet.”
Every nook and cranny was filled with books; a bibliophile’s dream marred only by an old PC that had faded to a dull yellowish tinge that matched his office. The machine perched precariously upon his far older wooden desk. Following a cursory inquiry about how my trip had been, his dark blue eyes sparkled beneath his bushy white eyebrows as he asked, “So show me this thing that you say has been in your family since the seventeenth century. How did you know it was Ladino (an eastern Jewish or Sephardic dialect related to Spanish)?
Opening my wallet to pull out the parchment, I replied, “Did a Google search. Well several, actually.”
Abecassis rolled up his shirtsleeves and with some difficulty donned surgical gloves. I noticed numbers crudely tattooed on his forearm. “So you were in the camps?” I asked.
Deadly serious he looked me in the eye. “Yes.”
I looked away not daring to ask him, whether it was actually only four and not six million Jews who had died in the Holocaust. Abecassis began to scold me for being so careless about the proper care of antiquities. Defensively I interrupted him, ”Look all I know is what my father told me one night, when he was drunk in a West Texas Chinese Restaurant. Nobody went there for the food.”
“Yes, go on.” With tweezers Abecassis carefully extracted the yellowed folded square from the wallet in my hands and placed it upon the only empty spot on top of his cluttered desk. There he delicately unfolded it into a half page size sheet. The bushes over his eyes arched to almost merge with his full head of spiky white hair. His resemblance to Ben Gurion was startling.
“My old man… I mean, father had just returned from a business trip to New York and was off into his usual sibling rivalry rant about his brother Peter having stolen everything—the WR Grace Company, the family mansion, beaucoup bucks, a girlfriend, and his favorite tennis racquet. But Peter didn’t have this family heirloom that he had just retrieved from a safety deposit box.”
The professor withdrew a large magnifying glass from an upper desk drawer, then adjusted his desk lamp to illuminate the parchment. He seemed not to be hearing a word that I was saying. Nonetheless he asked, ”Why?”
“Because my grandfather gave it to my father. And my great grandfather, W.R. Grace gave it to him. Aside from this, dad only left me one fucking dollar to me in his goddamned will. Pardon my French”
“Oh I see.” Abecassis was completely focused upon the brown, tattered sheet beneath his magnifying glass. “Does your family always behave like vipers?” His tone of voice was blasé.
“Usually. My guess is that granddaddy knew full well that my father was too eccentric to run a hot dog stand much less a multi-national anything, but he still wanted his son to have something even more important, something religious. My father went to Mass every day, late, but he went.”
“Nice to know that at least he was regular. Now what makes you think that this might be something religious?”
“Because an old Peruvian engineer insisted to me that everyone in Peru thinks that W.R. Grace was able to start building his financial empire there, by borrowing money from the only source of capital in Peru at the time (third quarter, nineteenth century), the Catholic Church. So I figure, why would the Church do that, unless he had something real special that they wanted?”
The professor looked up from the parchment and said, “Judging by the script this is definitely fifteenth century. It is a pawn ticket for a seder (Passover) cup and not any ordinary seder cup. The Last Supper was actually the last Passover. It is also signed by Queen Isabel I of Aragon in Latin.”
“Yeah. That part had me confused for years. Wait a minute! You mean the one who pawned her jewels to finance Columbus’ discovery of the Americas?”
“Apparently she pawned the Holy Grail instead.”
A little skeptical I replied, “I thought that darn thing was in England where King Arthur and his knights went jousting after it, or that it was just troubadour symbolism for the Virgin Mary’s poontang.”
“The troubadours wrote about sheathing their swords or phalluses in women’s scabbards. Though bowdlerized a bit in the Victorian era, they definitely didn’t mince words. So forget symbolism, son.
However there are several major candidates for the seder cup, or chalice as you gentiles call it, that supposedly held Jesus’ blood. Pope John Paul II recognized the one in Valencia, Spain as being the true Holy Grail. Though the chain of possession is clear enough from Joseph of Arimethea, who was allegedly at the crucifixion; it has been reliably dated to the sixteenth century.”
Abecassis turned to look me straight in the face, “So tell me how did your great-grandfather get his hands on this pawn ticket?”
“An old English girlfriend, God! She looked old; invited me to stay at her house in Cambridgeshire. After buying a non-refundable plane ticket, I called her to say that I would be there in two days. After a lot of hemming and hawing, she said that she hadn’t thought I was serious about visiting her and that she had a boyfriend. So I went from London to Derry in Northern Ireland and mailed her an IRA postcard with 5 letter code groups that I made up at random written on the back. I hoped MI5 would fix her for me. WOMEN: Can’t beat ‘em with a stick; but if you think real HARD, you can get even.”
Abecassis snapped, “What does THAT have to do with anything?”
“Well, while I was in Ireland, I did the usual plastic paddy trip and looked up my family tree.”
“AND!”
“There was a Colonel Oliver Grace who so vexed Cromwell’s forces during a siege that he was permitted to leave with his regiment to Spain, which wasn’t at war with England at the moment. I suppose they was just plum tired of losing boats after the Armada.
Being the spic that he was, the Spanish king didn’t pay Colonel Oliver on time if ever. So Ollie changed sides and fought for the French. Wild geese will goose the gander as it were. Eventually he died in bed back in Ireland following the Restoration. If you’ll look on the other side of that parchment, there is something written in Spanish about payment in full for services rendered by Coronel Grace.”
“And what makes you think that you might even be a sprig from that mighty oak?”
“There was a Baron Grace who died without issue after HIS regiment got wiped out in battle decades later during the Jacobite rebellion.”
“Sooo?”
“Well, he sure wasn’t no oak and some lucky Grace had to inherit the darn thing.”
“Was your father lucky?”
“Aside from not getting his pecker shot off in WWII, I would have to say ‘No.’ to that question. Also except for that night in the Chinese Restaurant he always thought that this parchment was proof positive of a worldwide Masonic Jewish conspiracy. He also believed that his father was senile, when he told him that it was a pawn ticket for the Holy Grail.
How much do I owe you?”
Not in the least upset by my reference to the sickness spawned by that Russian travesty of a French satire, the “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” Professor Abecassis asked, “Do you mind if I keep this document in a safer place than your wallet?”
“Sure. Go ahead, so long as you let me have it back when I need finally find that cup someday. You know, I have made my life miserable looking for the perfect C cup, and…”
“Shut up!”
“Yes, sir.”
His gaze wandering to the scars on both of my middle fingers and elsewhere he asked, “Were you in the military?”
“Naw, just clumsy. Why you need a mercenary? I need the money and will even cut my hair or what little is left of it.”
“Oh, never mind! You owe me nothing.”
He sat down on the battered black vinyl of the swivel armchair behind his desk, and began a weary discourse. “This explains the cruelty of the Inquisition. So a few Jews opened a few city gates to the Arabs, who until recently treated us far better than the Christians ever did. Do you know how many Moslems were burned by Torquemada?”
“No, sir.”
“Nobody does; there were probably only a handful. But the burnings, the viciousness of it all, the whole time the Spanish just wanted their Holy Grail back without paying interest much less the principal! None of Columbus’s trips turned a profit.
By the time the Spanish Monarchy was solvent and saturated with Indian gold, whichever Jew had the thing was probably hiding in some remote corner of the Spanish Empire and using it for Passover in secret. I wonder where it got off to?”
“Me too. Finders keepers.”
Chapter 2
The next day was Saturday—the Sabbath. Everything was closed. Looking for a cold lunch and a hot kiss I drove around, until I came to a freeway. Road signs in Hebrew, Arabic and English pointed to places that sounded vaguely familiar such as “Bethlehem.” The distances were miniscule compared to those back home, so I just kept on driving. However the roads to every town were blocked by bulldozed rubble. I must have covered the entire Northern half of the West Bank. Finally I came across two Palestinian family operated businesses within a quarter mile of each other. One looked like a small coffee shop and the other was a general store. I chose the latter. Because it was well covered by the guns emplaced in a three-storey building that the Israeli Defense Force had converted into a fort; I might avoid becoming a statistic. If only I had known that I would be going to Indian Territory, I would’ve worn a pair of cowboy boots and a ten-gallon hat.
A few days later, following a visit to the far more defensible Jewish Alamo, Masada, my trip to the Holy Land was at an end. I stopped in the dark at a gas station to top off the rental car. Just the same as an average night in West Texas the wind swirled man-sized dust devils in the lonely desolation outside the station's lights. A teenager pulled up with his car thumping an annoying rap over fluorescent lights beneath the vehicle. A typical adolescent mating display of the peacock sort.
At the rental agency return, a white prefabricated single storey building, there was the same homely redhead who had rented me a four wheeled urban crucifix. She asked what happened to the hubcaps, and told me that I owed an extra day for the car. I explained that maybe the hubcaps got stolen when was I in the West Bank, but more likely in a Tel Aviv parking lot. After we went over the dates several times, she said glumly, "That anything is possible in Israel." In Ireland they say the same thing, but laugh about it.
In the virtually deserted airport ticket terminal an aisle of seats was situated facing away from the usual airport plate glass windows. I sat down next to a pair of overweight middle-aged women stuffed into matching yellow T-shirts with doves on them. Their accents were British, but it was impossible to place which county. They explained that since they had been helping starving Palestinians with food, they expected trouble for their efforts, and therefore had also arrived five hours before flight time. I commented that it was highly doubtful that there was much due process involved in assassinating Palestinian leaders from helicopter gun ships.
Before I could ask the Brits why the Arab nations just don’t take the Palestinians in and make law abiding citizens out of them, a twenty something, chubby woman with black hair wearing a navy blue blazer and matching skirt arrived. She asked which flight I was on. I showed her my ticket. She said that flight had left the day before. With poorly concealed panic I tried to explain that I must have gotten confused because their Sunday occurs on our Saturday. Her suspicious scowl was bone chilling, when she asked, "Why did you arrive with one suitcase and you have two now?"
„I always pack one suitcase inside the other in order to take home souvenirs such as an under-age sabra (native born Israaeli).“ I gave the extra bag in question a slight kick with my good foot to suggest that it contained a concubine.
„Wait here!“
About 15 minutes later, she returned with a young beauty in a khaki uniform and tinted hair to match. Then the inquisition really started, only to be relieved by the fact that Israeli intelligence had intelligently damn, good taste in women. What should have been the khaki pride of the Israeli Defense Force’s infantry asked, "Mr. Grace why are you in Israel?"
"Would you believe, because I want to have your babies?“
Her frown was so pronounced that I knew anything even remotely of the sort was absolutely out of the question. "OK. I’ll tell you anything for a kiss! I confess. All daddy done left me was the pawn ticket for the Holy Grail!"
Too stymied to comprehend, she finally recovered sufficiently, after a couple of minutes of stunned silence, to say something in Hebrew into the shoulder mounted mouthpeice of her walkie talkie. Then, she turned to me again to ask, "What do you mean?"
"Well I thought that we could get to know each other better and you know like we could live happily ever after with the Holy Grail making us rich. Once I find it, that is.“ Ignoring the fact that her enthusiasm was as scarce as visitors since the commencement cermonies of the Second Intifada, I got carried away, and crowed, „The tourists will love it!"
Sensing a disturbing presence behind me I looked over my shoulder to see a blonde body builder in a beige suit. He was the about the size of a double door refrigerator, equally expressive, and made me more nervous than a cat in a roomful of rocking chairs. No matter how much I shifted he stayed directly behind me.
„So Mr. Grace why did you come to Israel?" She asked again.
"I told you that I have the pawn ticket for the Holy Grail. Well actually Ben Gurion is keeping it for me in his safe.“
"Come this way, please." Her guttural accent sounded ironically German.
I followed her towing the human refrigerator behind me. She turned us over to a group of other draft age girls in navy blue skirts and sky blue blouses next to an inactive conveyor belt in the far corner of the terminal. They spoke at length in Hebrew. I surmised that the infantry felt that her compatriots in the Air Force had a better command of English and the tourists who aspired to speak it—the high ground always prevailing over lowbrows. When not occupied with their radios they kept asking me the same questions over and over and over again. I had an eerie feeling they were just waiting for space to open up in a torture chamber somewhere deep in the putrid bowels of the airport.
I was extremely worried that the Shin Bet may have somehow discovered that I had once had been in a Holocaust Deniers chat group that called deceptively called themselves Historical Revisionists. Worst of all there was no way to un-enlist from that generally hateful group. Penelope, my girlfriend at that time, is a gothic dead ringer for Hermann Goering in drag and a feminist NAZI well beyond the fringe of the Rush Limbaugh variety. To her five devoted fans she is known affectionately as “Lucifera.” Our right raw cover version of “These Boots are Made Walking” still gets played from time to time on the radio. For old times sake and hopefully a quickie, before leaving home, I had asked her what souvenir she wanted me to bring her from Israel. She had replied, “A dead Jew.” But couldn’t name a single one, when I asked her how many Jews she knew.
The Rocky Horror Show reveries were interrupted. The beige refrigerator in a matching suit and I were, finally, force marched in tandem behind one of the pretty girls in uniform to a darkly lit room filled with single men such as myself. Stainless steel benches overflowed with various articles of men’s underwear and toiletries. This scrobbler was quite proud of the fact that none of the other usual suspects were priviledged enough to have personal bodyguards. Turning to mine, the human refrigerator, I said, "Look I didn't come to Israel to go to some S&M gay bar." He smiled in a grim way that made it plain that I had little choice in the matter.
Chapter 3
In a post-Bauhaus London office tower that had replaced the rural elegance of Bletchley Park an MI5 cryptographer placed into his Outbox a brown manila envelope. It contained a 3600 Dot Per Inch scanned and enlarged copy of the reverse side of my IRA postcard. One of his less popular colleagues leaned over the partition separating their adjoining cubicles. “What Alf you’re finally giving up, after only how many years?”
“According to Scotland Yard’s memo from the FBI it had a yank’s prints all over it. Maybe their real top spy shop, the National Security Agency, will have better luck cracking this code. The NSA’s supercomputers can do 50 gigaflops. Ours are only capable of 5.”
“But we have you, Alf.”
“Bob, good night and bugger off.”
“Not so quick there. Did it ever occur to you that it wasn’t a code at all?”
Trying hard to dispel any illusions about who was the nerd in this affair, Alf retorted, “Bloody fucking impossible. The yanks have a file on him. They don’t do that for any old wanker, you know.”
Bob’s lack of popularity may have had more to do with his persistence than his greasy, slicked down hair, and black rim glasses. “For IRA activities?”
“No, for some other matter in Mexico that they won’t tell us about. It is all rather hush-hush. So far as we know no one in the IRA has ever been there, except possibly on holiday. Colombia is an entirely different story as you should know.”
Bob leered, “And the bird he wrote to?”
“Other than having lived with a bloke who sliced and diced someone in a men’s loo in Hollywood, she’s as clean as a whistle.” Alf reveled in the knowledge at his fingertips thanks to the Patriot and other more local Acts that in less interesting times would have been prohibited as an utterly, unwarranted invasion of privacy.
Chapter 4
In the S&M luggage room my personal bodyguard disappeared as mysteriously as he had arrived in my life. His relief on duty was a young man of below average height with curly black hair in casual civilian clothes. He asked me to place my bags upon one of the benches, then, he proceeded to closely inspect every item in them before placing the contents in a neat pile. Afterwards, yet another, attractive young woman repeated the whole procedure to produce her own fresh pile. Left alone for a change, I took the opportunity to examine the computer terminal against the back wall. To my relief it was a monochrome dinosaur obviously connected to an obsolete mainframe.
While his bags were also being searched twice, a tall French photographer remarked to me that all this security made him feel safe. I replied that it was all just one big pain in the ass that no amount of Preparation H could fix—morphine, maybe.
The slight, curly haired guy told me to step behind a curtain, and into a booth in order to get searched. I told him that I insisted upon his more attractive female colleague doing the job. He grinned sincerely and agreed that he wanted her to search him too, but there was no way around regulations. It was a relief to know that he didn’t enjoy his work. Afterwards as he and I were leaving the privacy of the booth, the object of our apparently mutual desire asked me about the sheet of paper with the directions to Professor Abecassis office. Satisfied, the little schmuck snuck off alone to smoke a cigarette somewhere.
“Oh, he is holding the pawn ticket to the Holy Grail for me.”
Before I could finish explaining and get to the juicy part about Colonel Oliver Grace, a pair of burly men in white coats arrived, dragged me outside and shoved me into an ambulance. There they injected me with some kind of sedative that I rather enjoyed. The brutes refused to give me another shot as we headed up the ever-shifting hills to Jerusalem.
“Whaya you taking me?” I was woozy.
“Eitanim.” Said the one restraining me in the rear of the ambulance.
“Was dat?”
“The place where we keep all the religious delusionals, until they are safe to put on a plane back home.”
“Me rewijous?”
As I drifted off into blankness he barked, “So then what’s this crap about a pawn ticket for the Holy Grail?”
This writer woke up in a tiny hospital room that barely accommodated the two beds in it. Light streamed painfully through barred windows. The other occupant was a skinny older man with grey hair, cut into bangs. He stared into space—obviously catatonic. A psychiatrist was reading my chart. I didn’t notice anything about him at all. My attention was riveted to the nurse who accompanied him. Her café au lait skin contrasted wondrously with a white uniform which seemed incapable of containing her large breasts. Wavy jet-black hair framed a devilishly foxy face. The center of my bed looked like a Bedouin tent.
I asked her, “Ever see the movie ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’?”
Unfortunately her nametag was in Hebrew. While I was examining her left hand to see if it was marred by a wedding ring, she deftly used her other hand to slam the blunt end of a pencil dead square upon the head of my penis. The tent collapsed immediately.
Pretending not to notice the preceding, the psychiatrist announced himself, “I am Dr. Avi Stern. “ His black eye patch combined with his puffed up manner made him seem positively cyclopean. Then he switched to an inquisitorial tone that would have made Torquemada proud, “So mister Grace, for how long have you had this delusion about the Holy Grail?”
“But Doc its true! All you have to do is call Professor Abecassis. He’s in the book.”
The nurse of all my wet dreams jotted down the name and left the room. Avi continued as before, “We’ll see about that. Now…”
I interrupted him in a tone reeking of conspiracy, “What’s the nurse’s name? Does she have a boyfriend?”
Coldly Dr. Stern replied, “Her name is of no concern to you, nor do I know about her love life. We are all professionals here. Now would you please tell me for how long you have, ummm, believed in the Holy Grail?”
“You know, I never really thought it was more than a myth until a few days ago “
In a tired tone of voice the psychiatrist said, “This happens all the time here in Jerusalem. People come to find God, only to end up thinking that they are him or one of his prophets. I am writing a paper for an English psychiatric journal about this unique condition that I have discovered—Dementia Dei Jerusalemus.”
“Sounds contagious, like the clap.”
Avi asked rhetorically, “Is everybody a moron in Texas?”
“No, sir. Just dumb ass, Rexall Cowboys, who manage to get away to the White House, before we can make steers out of them.”
“Shut up! We like that moron.”
“Whatever you say, Doc.”
“Now as I was saying. Down the hall we have three European patients who think that they are Christ; two Israeli Arabs who believe they are Mohammed; a Jew for Jesus from Los Angeles named Karen who thinks she is Mary Magdelene; and a lost, little girl from Costa Rica, who we can’t even begin to analyze other than that she is inseparable from her yomulka. She only speaks Spanish and none of our staff are bilingual…”
“Not even an odd bisexual? Come on there has to be a janitor somewhere around here who speaks Spanish. They always do…”
“As I was saying before your rude interruption ‘…biLINGUAL in Spanish and Hebrew.’ Thanks to the law of the Right of Return I doubt if we’ll ever be able to discharge the last two.”
“Wasn’t Jesus Jewish?” I asked with mock curiosity.
Somewhat confused the Dr. Stern replied, “Yes, of course.”
“Then like how are you going to deport any of them? Also why aren’t your patients killing each other, like all the so called sane people outside are doing?”
Flustered he blurted. “We don’t need any more religious crazies. We already have plenty of the ‘homegrown’ variety as you might say.”
Nurse big tits returned and said sadly to the psychiatrist, “A professor named Abecassis was DOA yesterday from a suicide bombing on a bus.”
“That’s a shame. He was nice guy. OK, Doc, so how long am I stuck here for? I need to go find the Holy Grail.” Perhaps I should have been more mournful about Abecassis, but I hardly knew the guy.
“For as long as it takes to make you forget such delusions,” Avi replied, then turned to nurse big tits and prescribed a sedative for me.
I groaned, “Hey Doc, double the dose. That stuff doesn’t do shit for me. Got any morphine lying around? That pawn ticket has been in my family for generations.”
“We need to keep all the morphine we have for the wounded and not dumbasses!” Doctor Stern spun on his heels and left the room with nurse big tits in tow.
They ignored my parting shot, “I think I am beginning to see why you all are so God damn serious all of the fucking time.”
Chapter 5
How do you have a conversation with a catatonic? “Hey pops, screw the rules and the ether. Got a cigarette?”
No answer. My roommate just kept staring at the wall.
“Uh what’s your name? Where do you come from? Haven’t I seen you somewhere like the History Channel before?” still no reaction.
“Do you suppose that LA woman who thinks she’s Mary Magdelene, is why three Jesus’ and two Mohammeds aren’t killing each other? You know, maybe she is like banging them all in a broom closet, when the staff isn’t watching? Perfectly sane people are blowing each other to bits outside these walls in the name of the same God. What else could explain it?”
Suddenly springing to life, my roommate sat up. Despite my not being a “spring chicken” ready for plucking any more, he angrily began to lecture me in a lilting brogue; as if I were some “wet behind the ears” freshman ready for a fucking, today’s tuition style. “That Mary Magdelene was a whore is a vicious slander started by the early Church fathers, who hated both women and Jews with a passion born of holy self-righteousness. In none of the liturgical Gospels, much less the apocryphal ones, is she mentioned as such. There was a Mary, who had nine demons cast out of her by Jesus, but there is no reason to believe it was the same Mary. In the Gnostic Gospel of Mary of Magdelene it is readily apparent that Jesus intended for her to carry on his Kingdom of God mission and not Peter, who is often depicted as a bit of a dunderhead even in the liturgical Gospels.”
Surprised for good number of reasons I remarked, “I thought there were only four Gospels.”
“Young man, there are at least two dozen. Four were accepted at the Council of Nicea to represent the four corners of the earth. Mark and another source called “Q” for Querelle, the German word for source, form the basis for the Mathew and Luke. The Germans discovered this, at the turn of the last century. John is a different beast entirely, where Jesus is always in control. It all comes down to whether the New Testament is history prophesized or prophecy historicized.”
Completely confused I could only reply, “You certainly know your shit about the bible.”
“As well I should having been a monk for twenty years and now having the good fortune to be a professor of Biblical Studies at a university in the US, when not otherwise confined here.”
I leaned over to his bed and stretched out my hand. “My name is Mike Grace. What’s yours?”
A bit wary, he hesitated momentarily, but shook my hand. “Dan.”
“You don’t have a last name?”
“Despite being tenured, I won’t have an academic position to return to if this unfortunate incident gets into the papers. So let’s just leave it at Dan.”
“Cool accent, Dan! You must be Irish.”
He huffed, “Is that irritating speech defect of yours congenital, or affected?”
“Naw. Just too much time in Texas.”
“And how long might that have been?” Dan retorted.
“With or without time off for good behavior?
“Huh?”
“So what are you in for Dan?”
“A certain Jesuit keeps denouncing my work in his books, which for reasons incomprehensible outsell mine. Approximately five blocks from here at this year’s convention of Biblical scholars, he claimed that an obviously Greek pottery shard was Herodian. He had unearthed the artifact at his dig at what he, quite mistakenly, believes was Cannae. Because it had wine stains above watermarks, he even had the temerity to claim that the shard was once part of a jug that had held the water Jesus turned into wine. When I picked up the shard to point out that the water stains were pluvial (rain) and not divine in origin, he placed his neck over a sharper edge in a deliberate attempt to discredit me.”
Once upon a time, during his misspent youth, this writer worked in the oil patch with a few convicted murderers. They were always little guys, like Professor Dan; who had been forced into a corner by bullies or life. I knew a lousy alibi, when I heard one. “So you tried to cut his throat with some priceless piece of pottery?”
Once a Catholics always a Catholic, Professor Dan sheepishly confessed. “Well there was no other way to put a stop to his foolish nonsense. Unfortunately I missed his jugular vein.”
“Dan, my man, there are better ways to get even than murder.”
“Such as?” Dan mumbled as he fell back onto his pillow, slipping into catatonia again.
“This Jesuit seems to be mighty gullible. So what if he finds the Q Gospel at his dig, and in it Jesus preaches a couple parables in favor of female priests and gay marriage, all the while insisting that he is a Jew, for once and all time?”
Professor Dan popped up like a jack in the box. “That’s utter nonsense! Who would believe such a thing? Biblical Palestine was a completely patriarchal society with extreme strictures such as stoning for homosexuals. Also the status of women was clearly little better than of chattel…”
His catatonia a fond memory, I interjected, before he could get longwinded again, “Or lady Moslems. Ah, yes; everybody gots to get stoned once in a while.
Look based upon what you say, all that strict stuff would only explain why the Gospels never included the parts that are so sorely missing from the New Testament.”
“But how would we plant it?” Doctor Dan was intrigued and farther from being catatonic than the Louisiana state line is from El Paso.
The notion of sending his university a bill for my psychiatric services seemed mighty appealing. “I have no idea. The only person I know in Israel died yesterday. That is except for an anti-Semitic, Moldavian prostitute. She has me confused with her older brother, and is therefore of little use to me. Let’s write it first and then worry later about how your buddy discovers it.”
Dan bawled, “He may be an idiot, but he will have it carbon dated!”
I tried to mellow him out with a question guaranteed to please any professor anywhere, and at any time, “Please refresh my memory. How does that work?”
“A small sample is burnt, then the ratio between the carbon 12 and carbon 14 isotopes is measured.”
“I know you can order heavy water with either Deuterium or Tritium isotopes through Fischer Chemical Supplies. We can probably just order Carbon 14 and adjust the age of the Q Gospel to whatever we want it to be.”
Professor Dan snapped, “What are you trying to do, have it date to the future?”
“How’se that?
“The Carbon 14 has to be lower than normal!”
“Oops. You mean like old Carbon.”
“That’s right.”
“You mean like oil or petroleum to you educated types?
“That’s right.”
“So if a plastic ball point pen was carbon dated it would give a really old date?”
“Yes. Probably about 20,000 Years Before the Present.”
“So that explains what I saw about a South African kindergarten teacher in the Houston Post. I used to work there on the inserting machines, you know.”
‘”No I didn’t. “ As if Professor Dan cared.
“Yeah. I got free newspapers.”
“So what did you read?” Dan was getting irritated.
“Well this woman had her class paint a rock. Then somebody stole it. A couple years later it was found out in the desert…”
“You mean ‘veldt.’”
“Yeah whatever you call it. So it’s mistaken for a aborigine rock drawing…”
“You mean ‘bushman petroglyph.’”
“Ok. So it gets carbon dated and announced on the national news as the world’s oldest rock, err…I mean petroglyph. Then the teacher recognizes it and wants it back!”
“So?”
“The kids must have used an oil based paint.”
“I never would have thought of that.” Dan conceded with weariness.
Proud of myself I smirked. “You’ve also probably never cooked up crystal meth(ethrine) neither, nor have a mother, who used to hold Uranium leases by seeding them with another controlled substance, U235.
Irked Dan asked, “But what does some kindergarten class have to do with planting scrolls?”
“We use plastic and make it look old. Hey! I wonder if these rooms are bugged?”
They were and the psychiatrist was probably furious that I had cured his catatonic case, after his favorite psychologist had failed to accomplish much of anything with weeks of intensive Freudian talk therapy. The pounding of angry footsteps echoed in the corridor outside grew ever closer. I quickly gestured to Dan to zip up his mouth and lie back down.
When Dr. Stern entered the room, I was carrying on a conversation with myself in a quasi-Celtic, mish mash of a partially academic accent. “Ay! By gosh y begorah, laddy, and what it’ll be for ya today? Fish from the sky er bread sheared?”
While Dan stared into space motionless, I shifted from one side of my bed to the other to face myself simulating an animated two-character monologue. “No I think I’ll settle for big juicy T-bone, dark on the outside and pink on the inside like nurse big tits.”
“Ay laddy, you better be thinking of other things now. The only food we get here be Diazepam (Valium) laced with saltpeter. Your pecker gonna be history prophesized!”
Changing out of character I couldn’t avoid noticing the psychiatrist’s face red with professional rage, and pleaded in my own voice, “Hey Doc, how about doubling that dosage now? All my daddy done left me was the pawn ticket for the Holy Grail and now it’s done lost in some dead man’s safe.”
As Avi brusquely turned to leave the room, he smashed into nurse big tits. She had been struggling to keep up with him in her white pump heels. Due to her more than adequate pair of front bumpers, she seemed to not be phased in the least by the collision; if it had occurred in a street, it would have totaled out a Hyundai. Nor did she seem to notice me leering at how well made her body parts were. Dr. Stern barked, “Take Mr. Grace to the dayroom, and see that he doesn’t make any more trouble there.”
Chapter 6
As nurse big tits and I passed a broom closet, faint, muffled moans of pleasure and a vague thumping were barely audible to me at least. The spacious day room was large and airy, but marred by dingy plastic floor tiles and black patient bars on the unwashed windows. Nurse big tits pointed to a cheap linoleum table that had seen better days. What appeared to be a slender, pubescent teenager wearing a yomulka adorned with gold lace sat alone and seemingly lost, while toiling over two thin blocks of alabaster that looked like cheap schotchis from a tourist trap in the old city. Drawing closer to her flower child psychedelic radiance I could see that the girl was absorbed in chiseling Hebrew characters onto the end of the Ten Commandments by pounding on a plastic knife with a rock hard dinner roll.
I sat down next to her in front of a messy pile of broken plastic cutlery set amid a plentitude of breadcrumbs sufficient for any flock of birds or the multitude at the miracle of the loaves and fishes. Nurse big tits walked away with a surprising chuckle. Summoning my most casual manner I asked, “Yo! Angel face, you Costa Rica? Me speakum heap big Spanish. Me man Grace, Mike as it were.”
She ignored me, while muttering in Spanish that she couldn’t quite get the eleventh commandment “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s kiffa (yomulka or beanie)” to fit.
Sincerely perplexed and struggling to recall the Spanish that I had picked up along the way here and there since high school, I asked her, “What good that commandment in Costa Rica? Impossible, many Jew there.”
Almost in tears she said, “Everyone at home keeps making fun of my kiffa and taking it away and making me chase them to get it back.” Then she brightened to continue breathlessly, “But they don’t know that Escazu was settled by Jews escaping the Inquisition. And long before that, the lost tribe of Israel arrived thousands of years ago, before even the Spaniards, and made stone Torah balls to signify the oneness of God, since they couldn’t write yet. If they couldn’t read a map how could they be expected to write?”
“Huh? Wait one minute. Go back. What you say ‘escaping the Inquisition.’ How you know this and what you name?”
“Lolita Peron Yablonsky.” It was impossible to determine if she had bedroom eyes or was stoned out of her mind.
“Peron you middle man?”
With an alluring shake of her faded blonde tresses she slurred, “No. Its my last name.”
“What hell ‘Yablonsky’?”
Growing irritated with my obtuseness she snapped, “It is my second last name and my mother’s first last name.”
“You say it mother’s virgin name?”
“Yes. Her grandmother was Jewish and escaped the Holocaust from Poland to Costa Rica in a cruise ship from hell. The government of Costa Rica raised the entrance visa fees 10 times.”
“Many, many times?”
“No! It was only once, but very profitable for Costa Rica.”
“OK. Me comprehend.”
Lolita grinned slyly, “You want to know who my paternal grandmother was?”
“How old you?”
“20”
“OK. Tell me. Me gottum all day and night also.”