The Last Testament: A Memoir (33 page)

²
And it came to pass, that as he sowed, he stepped on a rake, which struck him in the nether regions.

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And a passerby caught it all on his smartphone; and rushed home, to scatter the images thereof amongst his many acquaintances.

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And some of the copies were sent to outdated addresses, and yielded nothing but error messages;

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And some were devoured by spam blockers, and withered in junk mail folders;

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And some fell into the hands of those with lives; and they perished in the trash.

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But a few were received by the kind of people who find video of other people being struck by rakes in the nether regions most amusing;

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And they distributed the images thirty-, sixty-, a hundredfold; until they became viral, and spread their meme around the world.

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(This is not a parable. Knowest thou that viral video “Sower Gets Hit in the Nether Regions”? That’s how it happened.)

THE GOOD SAMARITAN

¹⁰
A certain man went down from Jerusalem to Jericho, and fell among thieves, who stripped him of his raiment, and wounded him, and departed, leaving him half dead.

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And by chance there came down the road a certain priest: and when he saw him, he passed by on the other side.

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And likewise a Levite, when he arrived at the place, came and looked on him, and passed by on the other side.

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But a certain Samaritan, as he journeyed, came to where he was: and when he saw him, he broke down and wept;

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For he saw that the man was his colleague in law enforcement, who had been but three weeks short of retirement.

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And from that moment this Samaritan swore a sacred oath: to track down the robbers who had done this to his partner . . . and the two heartless bastards who’d left him for dead.

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What followed was one man’s bloody journey into the dark night of his own soul; where he would find that sometimes, the line between justice and vengeance... is drawn in blood.

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This summer, Taylor Lautner is ONE... GOOD... SAMARITAN.

THE SHREWD MANAGER

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There was a certain rich man who had entrusted his riches to a wealth manager; and a rumor began to spread that the manager was wasting the man’s possessions.

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So the rich man went to the manager, and said to him, “What is this that I hear about you? Give an accounting of your management.”

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And the shrewd manager looked up, rose slowly from his desk, and said, “An accounting of my management? Thou seekest ‘an accounting of my management’?

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Look around. Look at this office. Look at this view. Look at this pen. Platinum. How’s that? How’s that for an ‘accounting of my management’?

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Listen, buddy: I’ve been spinning gold out of thin air since before bozos like thee were suckin’ on thy Mommy’s yaboes.

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And as a
result,
I have grown wealthy.

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As a
result,
my boat containeth an onboard lake containing a one to ten scale model of the boat itself, including its own lake and scale model.

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As a
result,
my third house is to thy house, what my first house is to my third house.

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Verily, buddy, I operate on intellectual levels whose very existence could not be dreamed of by the likes of douche bags like unto thee.

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Thy money is fine, OK? Now go.

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Go.

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Go home to thy family and keep spoon-feedin’ ’em that bullshit about what a man thou art.

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Mazel tov, fuckface.”

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That manager died on the lam in Mexico worth $50 billion.

CHAPTER 15

THE SAYINGS OF JESUS

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It is easier for a camel to walk through the eye of a needle, than two camels.

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What profiteth a man, if he gains the whole world, and loses his soul? Besides the whole world, I mean.

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With God all things are possible; but with money all things are probable; and with a good accountant they’re all deductible.

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Judge not, lest ye be judged; unless thou art a judge; in which case, judge away.

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Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. Yet when thou ... what? So I like flowers. So what?

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If the blind leadeth the blind, both shall fall into the ditch; which is pretty funny.

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Man shall not live by bread alone. Yet at restaurants it is easy to forget this and end up full before the appetizer.

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The L
ORD
is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters. Then one morning he bringeth me to the shed out back and
boom!
, he maketh me into lamb chops.

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Do unto others as others would do unto thee the second thou turnest thy back, the bastards.

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Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots? Not that I meaneth to compare Ethiopians to animals. Ethiopians have beautiful skin, actually. Why would they want to change it? I love Ethiopians. Thou knowest what, forget this whole saying.

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Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s; and to God the things that are God’s. It might help to put them in two piles.

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When thou givest alms, do not let thy left hand know what thy right hand is doing. Whereas with juggling the opposite is true.

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If a man strikes thee on one cheek, turn to him the other. Then, having shown thyself impregnable to cheek attack, beat the crap out of him.

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And they shall beat their swords into ploughshares; and their spears into pruninghooks; and their other weapons into other types of obscure agricultural equipment; and nation shall fight nation no more, but instead do dull farming stuff.

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He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone. Then, stones 2 through 1,000 are open to anybody.

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The lion shall lie down with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the goat. And the products of these unions shall be liambs and goatpards, respectively.

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I tell ye, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, “Move from here to there,” and it will move. Seriously. Try it. Hold on; I would get this on tape.

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God never shuts a door without opening a window; for he wants thy house to be drafty.

CHAPTER 16

¹
O
nce his material was written, Jesus debuted it in his first major sermon, at a popular local venue known as the Mount; and on the strength of that appearance he gained a cult following.

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Yet more than his words, it was his deeds that won him renown; for he had already developed a reputation as a miracle worker, one who could do for the sick, possessed, and deceased what a boutique hairdresser can do for the split-ended.

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Miracles are a tricky business; their impact on an audience is matchless in terms of oomph, yet they tend to raise certain expectations that grow ever harder to meet.

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We collaborated on 37 miracles during Jesus’s three-plus years as a minister, a rate of one a month; a good pace, coming not so often they were taken for granted, yet not so rarely that the crowd grew restless.

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The miracles were of four varieties; the most common were healings, of which there were 19.

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Blindness; deaf-muteness; dropsy; leprosy; fever; paralysis; internal bleeding; we had a nice mix.

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The healings were always received with awe; for this was a period when the proscribed medical treatment for most of these ailments was hillside abandonment.

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By the end the clamor for Jesus’s restorative gift became so overwhelming, we were obliged to stem the number of miracle-seekers, lest the rest of his ministry grind to a halt;

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So H. G. devised a tedious series of questions on parchment that all would-be patients were obliged to complete in duplicate before they could even schedule an appointment with him; and this proved effective.

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Eight other miracles spoke to Jesus’s control over nature: his supernatural ability to calm a storm, or walk on water, or provide last-minute catering when a horde of followers crashed what it said
specifically on the invitation
was a disciple-only dinner.

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These I liked best, for they were on a grander scale; they were spectacles of a kind I had had little occasion to produce since Exodus, and I had missed the razzle-dazzle.

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The Feeding of the Five Thousand was especially memorable; for not only did I turn seven loaves and fishes into food for 5,000 people, but I heightened the marvel by transforming the bread from white to ciabatta, and the fish from carp to Dover sole.

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Seven of Jesus’s miracles were exorcisms; and of these I was highly dubious.

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He believed himself to be removing demons from the possessed; the possessed themselves later believed this to be the case;

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But I was witness to all of them, and in my opinion of the seven “possessed” souls, three were epileptics, two were schizophrenics, and one was manic-depressive.

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Only one—the Gerasenes demonic—was legitimately possessed, and even this must be regarded with an asterisk;