Magnificent Vibration (14 page)

We are banging away on my little bed, she breathing heavily and leaking her lust all over my bottom sheet, when I hear the front door open with its characteristic squeak/honk.

We both tense, unable to actually make a move to hide the fact that we are seriously in flagrante delicto when I hear my mother yell, “Horatio, where are you? Mrs. Whiting?” Funny she should call out to both of us. I am shaft-deep in the aforementioned Mrs. Whiting and we are both butt naked. I leap off Virginia and pull on my pajama bottoms, already coming up with ailments that are possibly fatal and that have kept me in bed all day. The bitch is on her own. Well, not really, Mrs. Whi . . . Virgi . . . the reverend’s wi . . . damn it—nympho-woman jumps up, runs headlong into my closet that houses my cheap mismatched Abercrombie and Fitch outfits, and slides the door shut. (???!) As mother walks into my bedroom I see the Rev’s wife’s one-piece saintly garment lying on the floor where she disrobed in her wanton abandon. I give it a swift kick and send it sailing under my bed.

“What’s going on? You look flushed,” says mother with frightening intuition.

She should work for the CIA, I swear to God. I grab my stomach, mainly to hide the fact that Woody is “tent-poling” my pajama bottoms, and feign severe ill health.

“I’ve been throwing up all day,” I answer as convincingly as possible, given the circumstances.

“Where’s Mrs. Whiting?” She is relentless and seems determined to decipher the mixed messages she is apparently receiving.

Flying by the seat of my jammies, I stammer, “She had some kind of emergency at home. Left about an hour ago. I’ve been watching Josie,” I lie like a bastard.

“Humph,” she says, then, “What’s that awful smell?”

“What smell? I don’t smell anything.”

She sniffs the air, unknowingly breathing in randiness, lust, and the effluvium of human sexual secretions.

“I’m going to check on Josie,” I say, feeling bad for using my angel girl as an alibi, but I would hope she’d understand given the lay of the land.

“Just a minute, Horatio!” My mother’s voice freezes my blood.

“Something’s going on. What are you hiding?”

“God, nothing, Mom.”

“Don’t blaspheme,” she says, apparently taking a page out of my book on severe ADD. “I can hear breathing.”

I start to puff and pant like a fool in a vain attempt to distract her and make her think it was me.

“I told you I don’t feel good,” is my unrelated answer.

This woman has the ears of coyote, the mistrust of a jilted lover, and the instincts of a TV psychic! I am so screwed. She is eyeing my closet.

I turn and reach out a useless hand as she moves to the closet door.

“Mom! Stop!” is my best shot.

She slides it open and, God help us, there is the Reverend’s wife, naked as the day she was born but with a lot more pubic hair. She has the look, I would imagine, that a tuna might wear as a ton-and-a-half white shark roars in for the kill, and she is vainly trying to cover said
pubic hair along with her rather small breasts as if my mother, not seeing the actual body parts, will say something other than what is about to come out of her mouth.

“Jesus CHRIST!!!!” screams Mom.

“Don’t blaspheme,” I try as a distraction.

She backs away from the closet, white-faced, stuttering, mumbling . . . she is obviously and understandably having real trouble computing this.

“What? . . . How . . . YOU HUSSY!!” this from Mom; I believe the term is from the 1800s. She’s starting to turn red now, which indicates to me that possibly a little anger is creeping into the equation. I am speechless. So is the Reverend’s wife, although I hear some serious rustling coming from my closet indicating that maybe she’s grabbing some of my teenage wardrobe to cover her nakedness.

“This is unconscionable!!!” says mother. I don’t know what that means but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t mean “It’s all good in the ’hood.”

The Rev’s wife takes a few tentative steps out of the closet (so to speak) and I see she is now wearing one of my T-shirts.

“It’s not what it looks like, Mrs. Cotton, honestly,” she fibs.

Sadly, Virginia has chosen a rather unfortunate article of clothing from my stash of wrinkled, faded T’s. It’s one I bought on a whim to boost my public image, wore once, was soundly laughed at by my peers, and was retired to my closet shortly thereafter. On the lower part of the shirt is a large, red arrow that, on me, points in the general downward direction of my crotch, but because of her smaller size is positioned precisely over Ground Zero. Written boldly across the front of the chest is the awkward phrase, “Sex Machine!!” It is an unlucky choice of cover-up, considering. The meaning is not lost on my, by now, apoplectic mother, either.

“Get out of my house!!! NOW!!” is the fair response from Mom.

“Mother, look . . .” I begin.

“You SHUT UP!!!!” is all I get.

Back to Mrs. Whiting. “Grab your whore clothes and leave my house this instant!” Where is she coming up with this shit?

The Rev’s now totally freaked-out wife is vainly searching for her “whore clothes,” scanning my bedroom floor, panic-stricken.

I dive under the bed and retrieve her dress from where I had kicked it in hopes of avoiding this unbelievably surrealistic scene.

Mrs. Whiting grabs it from me and runs to the bathroom, where this whole thing started in the first place. Mother turns to me.

“You disgusting, loathsome boy. THAT is the wife of my PASTOR!!! She was married to him before God and all his angels!! Wait until your father gets home!!!” I guess we resort to these clichés when real words fail us.

“Dad comes
home
? When?” is my insolent retort. I really have no explanation or excuse or defense, but I do resent the “loathsome boy” comment. She takes a swing at me. I duck.

Mrs. Whiting leaves the bathroom, dressed, and at a fair clip as she heads for the front door.

“I will be calling your husband!!!” my mother yells to her and the door slams shut with a ringing finality.

Mom storms out, probably heading to the liquor cabinet and only then, after mild fortification, the telephone. In an absolute fog I make my way to Josie’s room, sit on her bed, and tell her what has just happened. My girl does not judge, does not criticize, does not hear. But I feel safer with her. I always have. I always will. I decide to try to prevent the nuclear war that my mother’s phone call will instigate and wait until I think she’s had enough to drink for me to reason with her. She is pretty
well buzzed by the time I approach her in the living room, and the conversation does not go at all well.

“Please don’t do this,” I try one final time as she reaches for the Phone of Doom. “I’ll never see her again. It’s over. I’m sorry I hurt everyone. I’m a terrible person, I understand that now.” I’m trying everything short of knocking her unconscious but she is hell-bent on ridding the world of the Devil and his minions and I leave the room as I hear her say “Reverend, it’s Julia Cotton. I’m afraid I have some very, very, very, upsetting news for you. I’ve just come from my son’s . . .” She halts as though being interrupted by the voice on the other end of the line. I stop to hear more. It’s too awful not to. But what I hear is definitely not what I am expecting to hear.

“The POLICE?!” my mother says with shock and disbelief. “They’re at your house now?!!”

My whole body goes numb and I feel like I’m floating.

The police?!! I didn’t know it was illegal to have sex with a reverend’s wife! Or maybe it’s just
anyone’s
wife. Mother has banged me over the head with the Ten Commandments since I was small enough to focus and I know “adultery” is definitely in there, along with murder and stealing, I just didn’t realize it was an actual punishable crime here on earth! I thought it was more like the “taking the Lord’s name in vain” or the “carved image” thing. And how did they find out already? Did they bug my room? Have they been spying on us with one those surveillance vans that have all the recording and video equipment inside, antenna on the roof, disguised as a plumber’s truck? Have they been filming, listening to (and possibly laughing at) all my pathetic thrustings and soft proclamations of love, in fact our entire illicit goings-on??? Will I be sent to prison?! I’ve heard all the stories of what they do to young men like me in prison. I think I’m going to faint. This whole deal just took a
major step to the left and I am cold with terror. I hear mother hang up the phone with nothing more said. Then the words drift out of her like a bad dream neither of us can wake from. “The police are on their way over here.”

Woodydamnit!!! This is all your fault!

“O
h, crap,” utters the Omnipotent Supreme Being. But not because of my sad little situation. The Vee-Nung have just turned their beautiful and fragile planet into a permanent black hole. All those millennia to create the perfect orbital star and “Poof.” Gone like Mrs. Whiting’s whore clothes in a randy moment. The OSB looks at “Earth,” which could quite possibly be the next in line for de-beautification by its destructive, ignorant, negligent masses. It’s enough to make an Omnipotent Supreme Being weep. The OSB has watched as “Earth” has struggled to rid herself of the lethal virus that is causing the infection and gradual destruction of her body. But the more intelligent elements of that same lethal virus have thwarted her plans again and again. Well-meaning scientists, doctors, and geneticists have all nipped AIDS, Ebola, and SARS in the bud. Where’s the frigging Black Plague when you need it? The OSB does not, as a rule, interfere in the workings of the Universe, but on “Earth” it may be time to move another chess piece.

W
e are beetling down the freeway to deliver Lexington Vargas to La Crescenta as the inadequate windshield wipers make a mockery of their name. Visibility is low. Keith Moon’s ghost still wallops the fragile roof, and I begin to wonder if this rain could actually punch holes in the flimsy ceiling and douse us all as we chug along at an astonishing forty-three MPH.

Both Lexington Vargas and Alice are deep into their own copies of
Magnificent Vibration
with the help of some hack, low-wattage interior lighting, which is making piloting the Kia in the rain even more difficult, but honestly, if I had my own copy of that book I’d be balancing it on my knees and reading it right now even as we careen toward La Crescenta. Not a word from either of them except for the occasional, sigh, moan, or
“Dios mio.”

What the heck is going on? I wish I hadn’t left mine back at the divorcee’s apartment complex I sadly refer to as “home.” I begin to hope that my sexual indiscretion with the whore of Babylon isn’t detailed too heavily in my version. But my head is also spinning at the greater potential meaning of the three of us coming together like this. Not to mention possible conversations with possibly God. I can come up with no reason or significance for any of it. And Alice has temporarily nixed the phone call that I am burning to make to the number in Lexington Vargas’s book. I think she’s scared. That’s a pretty reasonable reaction I guess, considering he’s the CEO of her company.

“STOP THE CAR!!!” suddenly screams the colossus in the backseat at the top of his quite prodigious lungs, and I react as though a SWAT team has just lobbed a stun grenade into the vehicle.

As I slam on the brakes, the lightweight Kia instantly and predictably launches into hydroplane mode, spinning in impotent circles across the mercifully fairly vacant lanes of the 101 and causing several
cars to dodge and weave around us. It all happens so fast. A giant, thirty-foot green-and-white freeway off-ramp sign crashes down onto the asphalt right next to us, scaring the crap out of me, sending sparks flying, and tearing itself to pieces on impact, none of which, thankfully, hits us, as I would guess the sign is made of much sturdier stuff than the auto that’s currently still spinning like a kid’s top. This is all accompanied by a deafening, end-of-the-world-type howling roar that is getting more thunderous by the second. I’m suddenly aware of something gigantic looming overhead. I finally get the damn Kia under control as an object the size of a football field comes into view through the upper edge of the windshield and very, very close.

“OH, SHIT!!!” we all seem to scream in unison as a colossal Airbus A380, the largest passenger jetliner in the world, thunders through the downpour, all lights blazing, and attempts to make a landing directly in front of us on the freeway. It looks monstrous and out of control as it descends. Large pieces begin shearing off the wings as they come in contact with walls, signs, pillars and posts at the edges of the roadway, sending sparks and debris in every direction and causing the giant airplane to lose what remaining control it is under.

I frantically pump the brakes as this incredible event unfolds right before our eyes. Even straddling all the north- and southbound lanes, the airplane is still too big for the freeway to give it a clear landing path. Cars are weaving, pirouetting, crashing into one another, the divider, and the off-ramp walls and generally adding to the shitstorm that is coming as the giant tires finally punch down onto the wet and shining blacktop. They hit so hard that most of the rubber shreds like gray string cheese on impact, the front wheel-strut collapsing altogether, causing the immense nose of the aircraft to drop, hit, and light up like the fourth of July. We’re all still screaming and the jet engine
noise is deafening as the giant metal flying machine roars down the highway—inexorably screeching, pitching, yawing, and sparking—destroying everything it happens upon until it finally lurches to a halt mere yards from a concrete overpass.