The Shit Prophet

The Shit Prophet

            Sometimes you’re born an ape.  What the hell you going to do about it you know.  When I think back on that homeless man, throwing poop.  I think to myself, you know, maybe that guys a prophet.  Maybe he knows something I don’t know.  And it worries me.  He’s out there throwing poop and he’s ahead of the game.  He knows the score man.  He knows the fucking score. 

            So I decided to go back out there.  To see if that guy’s still there.  And there he is, sure enough.  Throwing shit again.  The shit prophet I call him, to myself.  “Hey man, what’s the meaning?”  Well, he’s only speaking in parables or something.  That or schizophrenia.  Then he says, “I’ll tell you, but you got to throw shit first.”  I ask him, “Well, can I use gloves or a leaf or something man?”  He says, “No, or else it won’t work?”  He says, “I can’t tell you, unless you just do it this way, or else it won’t work man.”  I say, “This is absurd man.”  He goes, “You’re telling me.  You don’t know the half of it.” 

            That’s when the lights came in flashing behind us.  The shit prophet yells out, “Shit.”  “Preach brother!” I say.  And “Shit!” was about the truth of it too.  Well the police officer gets out of his patrol car.  Begins to walk over to the two of us.  Hand close to his gun because that’s the kind of guys we look like and I can’t blame him, I really can’t.  Well, he asks us, “What are you fellows up to?”  The shit prophet doesn’t reply and I’m not sure yet myself still.  The Officer sees we’ve got shit all over our hands and between our fingers and such.  Doesn’t smell too great to him either you can tell.  He doesn’t want to touch us, but not knowing what to do.  “Don’t you two move.” he says, as he calls for backup.  The shit prophet turns to me and whispers asking, “Can you run?”  I reply, “Yeah, I think.”  He says, “Ok.  Get ready to run when I say, ok man?”  I reply back, “Ok.”  He then turns to the police officer that’s standing about eight feet away and says, “Your mom farts in yoga class!”  This gets him cackling so bad he’s bent over laughing like a maniac.  Then he gets back upright, and yells, “Fucking run man!” 

He had already high tailed it and was pretty much out of there already before I got out the gate.  The officer, who happens to be pretty fat, says “Don’t you think about it!” to me.  But he can see it in my eye, and “Bam!” I’m out the gate.  “God damn it!” I hear from behind, with the noise of his belt bouncing around.  So I’m between these two guys, the police officer and the shit prophet and they’re both yelling out different things.  Now this shit prophet can really run.  I mean it is a sight to see.  This guy probably would have beat everyone in a four-hundred yard dash in the world Olympics.  Now I’m running and half out of breath and got a cramp in my side and leg and I’m about to die and my lungs feel like they’re going to rip right out of my chest.  I’m not making progress on the shit prophet, I mean who could, but I’m making distance from the officer, thank god.  And, I’m just thinking to myself, as this shit prophet runs fast as lightning strikes.  “What a guy.  What a god damn guy you know.  What a god damn guy!”

So he starts yelling at these kids on the playground.  I can’t hear what he’s saying at first.  Then I can, “Kids!  Get in the fucking car!  We got to go!  Daddies hungry.  We’re going to McDonalds.  Get your asses in the car NOW!”  I’m thinking, man this guy has kids?  He doesn’t seem very responsible.  But then the more I got to thinking about it the more it made sense you know.  He opens the door and flings the kids in like bags of potatoes into a storage cellar, now covered in shit at the armpits.  He jumps in the front, General Lee style like The Dukes of Hazzard and yells over to me, “You coming?”  Well the police officer is huffing and puffing but catching up now, so I jump and slide over the hood and jump in the other side.  I look in the back seat and say, “Hi kids!” and smile.  They smile back and wave.  Cute kids.  The shit prophet starts the car up, 1971 pea green Chevy Malibu.  Throws his hand out the window as hard as one can.  The he does that thing where you act like you’re rolling up a window with your left hand as the right hand raises its middle finger slow and hard like the beauty of opening the sails of a pirates mast.  The cop is almost to the car now.  He revs the engine, tires start spinning and we fly out of there.  He yells, “Your sisters a nun!”  The kids in the back are laughing and asking about McDonalds.  There’s shit on the steering wheel.  He presses in the cigarette lighter, it pops out and he lights one up.  Asks if I’d like one too?  “Fine thanks.” I say.  He says, “You got a name my friend?”  “Yeah, Joe I say, Joe Doyle.  You?” I ask.  “Dean.  Dean California.”  “What a name” I say, “What a god damn name.”  He says “It isn’t so special.  Lots of people hate California.  For good reason too.  It’s also got the San Andreas Fault running right through most of it always full of earthquakes and one day might just break in two.  I think it’s running right through my mind sometimes, the San Andreas Fault.”  He reaches his hand over after flicking his cigarette butt out the window.  I reach out and we shake shit covered hands.  He says, “Damn fine to meet you Joe Fucking Doyle!”  I come back, “Nice to meet you too Dean Fucking California!”  “What a guy.  What a god damn guy.”  Next thing you know the kids are hollering out when they see those golden arches that might as well be the pearly gates, “McDonalds!  McDonalds!!!”

A pair of pink fuzzy dice hanging from the rearview mirror come to a slow undulating stop as the car parks.  “Kids.  Daddies got a bag of clothes.  I want you all to go to the bathroom and change and wash up.  We’ll be in right behind.”  We both go in and wash up too, after he wipes down the steering wheel and car with some rags from the trunk.  “Kids.  This is Joe Doyle, meet the nice man.  Joe, this is Dakota, Presley & Preston.”  I smile and wave to the kids again.  And they I.  Two girls and a boy.  Ages about six, eight and nine.  Cute kids.  We get to the counter and Mr. California says, “Whatever you want, on me friend.”  He orders, “Let me get three happy meals, some extra happiness on the side if you got it.”  The girl at the counter doesn’t know what to make of this remark and stares back blankly.  We both put our orders in and I insist on paying for my food but he doesn’t accept.  “What a guy.  What a god damn guy.”  The kids ate their meals real quick and then went to play on the playground.  He told the kids not to play in the ball-pit.  Then he tells me, “The ball-pits are disgusting.  You know they’ve found fecal matter in those things.  Saw it on 60 Minutes.”  Then he says, “My names not really Dean California by the way.  I apologize for not being up front in the first place.  It’s just with how the world is now days, you can’t trust anybody anymore.  My name’s really John Mountain.  I’m a veteran.  I just changed my name so people would fuck off you know.  I like to read books.  Like to be left alone.  I like to select who gets to know me.  There are very few people out there that I’d really want to know or have know me, you know.  But Joe Doyle, I could tell right away.  You’re one of those kind of people.  We got involved doing a lot of bad things in the war.  Even if you were a good guy you know.  And you didn’t do these things directly.  You were still attached to the events you know.  And a lot of the guys.  They weren’t very intelligent or anything so it was kind of like you were the only one there you know.  That these dirty little secrets were yours and yours alone to keep.  And do you think the American people want to hear more about the government and war’s?  You bet your sweet ass they don’t.  They don’t want to hear about blowing kids heads up like watermelons on accident and killing families in their sleep.  They want to watch their football games on Sundays and have a nice seven-layer bean dip.  They want to be Christians that can kill in law enforcement and in the military and look past the problem of homelessness on a Monday and vote for fiscally conservative policies to get a thousand dollars back at the end of the year.  Yelling at the homeless guys to ‘Get a god damn job!  You lazy bums.”  Meanwhile displaying all the empathy of a turd floating down the capitalist river and probably even assaulting the homeless man on occasion after a few rounds at the pub for good measure.  Which really accounts for the lack and unhappiness in their own lives.  Nobody wants to see the homeless because they reflect our lacking empathy and the failings of our society and ourselves.  The contradictions between a caring society and the difficulties of individual economic prosperity and climbing the social ladder.  Criminalize homelessness, make it illegal, give tickets for it and hide the problem but don’t fix it and call it the land of the free.  God Bless America!  Anyways, I digress.  Sometimes I go on tangents Joe.  Leo Tolstoy had something important to say about Christians and killing by the way, in a damn fine book, “The Kingdom Of God Is Within You.”  That they’re not supposed to do it those fucking dummies.  Every things wrong with the world Joe.  It’s basically all corrupt my friend.  Fiat money.  Ad infinitum quantitative easing of the Federal Reserve.  The Federal Reserve.  Most of the wars we get into for geopolitical gain of other countries resources.  Lobbying of elites for further collection of financial and political power.  Corporate bailouts and government subsidies.  Religion.  The American Psychiatric Association receiving 30% of it’s funding from big Pharma making up arbitrary conditions in the name of pseudo-science.  The consolidation of 90% or more of the media being owned by only six companies and fifteen elites.  Loss of a free press.  Narratives and Paradigms spun up as truths.  A political system that no longer works for the working class.  A loss of a middle class.  Reality TV real estate megalomaniacs playing president with narcissistic personality disorder and the emotional maturity of a seven year old.  Rallies where the largest base of evangelical white America come out to wave flags and support the Reality TV star.  One move away from dawning white KKK hoods and that’s as close as were getting to someone that cares about the economy.  An endemic of obesity.  A culture that thrives on profit, individual greed, lack of empathy, and short term gain at the expense of global warming, civil public discourse and brotherly love.  America slid down some type of shit-slide and lost its culture and soul long ago.  Perhaps being rounded into a pen like some type of cattle by its own government and elite class, or perhaps just by the nature of the path of least resistance.  The blow being softened by materialism and Netflix.  American runs on Budweiser commercials, football on Sundays, someone singing the national anthem followed with a “God bless America!  Home of the Brave.  Land of the free.”  Land of the ignorant I say.  Land of the enslaved.  The best kind of slavery is the kind you don’t even know you’re a part of my friend.  Tolstoy said you were a slave if you were in the military and he was a pretty smart fella.  Maybe it’s the price we all have to pay for the trail of tears and the “Progress of man.”  Living on lands we took.  Maybe that’s what the western world is.  A land of illness.  Projecting the larger misgiving of man.  Greed and violent overtake.  A hole in himself.  Maybe this is our birthright.  Maybe we deserve all the sickness.  America.  Land of the ill.  Land of the enslaved.  Land of the man with a hole in himself he can never fill.  Destroyer of worlds.  Spreader of violence.  Bearer of decay and pestilence.  Harbinger of death.  Shit-posters of Instagram.  The egotistical delusions of all of us being stuck in our own movies.  Well you know what I say to it all Joe Doyle.  God bless America.  God bless god damn America!  And you know why I say that.  Because it seems to be better than a lot else going around.   America realized that man was a selfish creature and capitalism is a system that works perfectly for that.  With flaws of course.  But people don’t try to go to other countries.  They go to America.  And they go with a dream.  And with that dream immigrants often do better than indigenous Americans.  Because Americans often don’t have the dream and work ethic.  Don’t know what bad really is.  Anyways I digress again.  I often go on these tangents.  A part of my PTSD or something.”  “Preach brother.”  I say.  “What a guy.  What a god damn guy.”

“Anyways, we got to get going.  I got an old lady back home.  If you’d like to come over for dinner, we’d love to have you sometime.”  “That sounds great John Mountain.  Sure, I’d love that.  Thanks for sharing all that with me.  What a guy.  What a god damn guy.”

Well the next week I go over for this dinner.  But he says we have to go.  He’s had a vision from God.  He says he has to take me to church real quick before we eat.  We jump in the car and he says he got it wrong last time.  About looking through shit for a message.  That it’s in fact written on the walls down in a subway station and he knows exactly where.  He got it mixed it.  It was written in shit on the walls down in a subway tunnel.  Not writings in his shit.  So we get to the subway station and park and go down and come to the end of the platform and he says we got to jump down on the tracks and walk down a ways to get there.  He gives me a flashlight and turns his on and jumps down about the four to six feet.  I feel like this is a horrible idea but I really believe in this guy and consider him a friend already so against my better judgment and before I know it I’m down there with him.  In the tunnels looking for whatever messages have been written in shit by God for him or us or something like that.  It’s as bleak and dark looking as most people’s future down there and he’s walking right through the middle of the tracks occasionally looking back.  The claustrophobic feeling has me feeling like a rat the further and further I go in with him.  Thoughts of doubt and hesitation and fear and turning back start to build in me like an ocean filling to the brim of an idiot vessel ready to crash over.  He turns his neck for a moment and sensing it perhaps he says “Come on we got to keep going!”  “What am I doing with my life?”  “What kind of life choices am I making?”  “Maybe this is just a crazed maniac that is going to kill me and leave me dead in a tunnel down here all by myself.  Before or during or after he rapes me.”  “Doesn’t it feel glorious to be god damn alive Joe Doyle? he shouts back?”  His eyes barely gleam in the pitch dark tunnel we are walking down together.  They are beginning to look more and more animal like.  Like a rat.  Maybe a demon.  Suddenly he stops.  “Did you hear that he asks?”  “I didn’t hear anything!”  “Turn off your light for a second.”  We both do and we are standing in pitch black.  I can’t tell if my eyes are open or closed.  Standing in this void brimming of emotions.  I can’t tell where I end and where the walls of the subway station tunnel begin.  The air is cold and somewhere from inside me I am warm but where the two begin and end, I can’t understand.  The subway walls might as well be crawling with the human emotion of my life.  That or something else too.  A creature either way, I may not wish to face. 

“God is here Joe Doyle.  Jesus Christ is here my friend.  Do you feel it?  He’s right in this fucking tunnel with us my friend.  And he wants you to know he’s there for you and he loves you and he loves everyone and here he comes.”  A cold draft of air sails by and we’re still standing in the abyss of a something.  What was a subway tunnel but now I am not sure.  It feels like we are inside an animal.  The true animal of ourselves.  With the cold draft passing by my skin, a warm draft followed next.  The shit prophet asked, did you hear that again.  Still I hear nothing.  He says, that’s the sound of silence coming, and bean to sing The Sound of Silence and seemed to know it word for word.  The song rang beautifully through the tunnel walls and was all consuming.  Finishing, “(missing song lyrics for copyright reasons.”  Here comes God Joe Doyle.

With that a faint rumble on the tracks came and what sounded like a faint sound of metal on metal down the line somewhere creaking like a steel monster coming for us.  It grew louder and louder and soon a faint light began to grow far down the tunnel from around the bend.  Get to the side Joe Doyle, you’re about to become a believer.  Well I got to the side sure.  John Mountain just stood there in the middle of the tracks not moving.  “John, get the fuck out of the tracks.  The trains getting close you crazy fucker.”  “Not today Joe Doyle.  You demand a miracle.  Then a miracle you shall have.  Because you have faith less than a mustard seed my friend.”  “John get the fuck out of the tracks!”  He just laughed maniacally, shouting out, “Here I am God, servant of your will. I wear the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of spirit.”  The light of the train began to fill the void of the tunnel that became too bright to look at.  Blinding and trying I tried to look at John Mountain as he stood there in the tracks God coming down.  Somewhere in between the blinding light, for a moment I could have sworn the shit prophet was covered in golden armor and wasn’t a man.  Just a beam of shining light to magnificent to behold.  I believe this man was actually an angel.  The train was almost here.  I pressed firmly against one of the walls sure of death coming soon.  John yelled once more singing in a full roar that sounded more like a lion than a man.  Of what rumbled more, his singing or the train I could not decipher.  “”(missing song lyrics for copyright reasons).”  And the train came down the line then and John didn’t move one bit.  It raced by me and pressed to the side for my life I couldn’t say how much room was between us.  I closed my eyes and it screamed by and I thought it was death.  As it rumbled and passed like lightening and steel, something blasted right through me too.  I couldn’t ever explain exactly what it was, but it always seemed to surely be to me, that God had finally touched me and given me the truth I had always needed.  Sure as shit.  And it felt good.  After what seemed like forever, that train finally did pass.  I stood in drenched in my cold and damp sweat, reawakened as the train left down the like the cold death of a steal snake eating all faithless rats stuck in its tunnel and filling them with the deathly fearful spirit of God.  All of a sudden a flashlight turns on in the middle of the tracks where John had stood.  “What a fucking ride Joe Doyle!, what a fucking ride mate!”  He laughed maniacally again and shun his light on the wall across from me.  There writing in what looked like bloody shit, “The Kingdom of God is Within You Joe Doyle. God loves you.” 

I can’t say the feeling lasted all the time.  But I think for John Mountain it surely did.  For myself all I can say is that day, I became a believer.  “Come on Joe Doyle, we got to get dinner.  I’m famished and the old ladies going to be PO’d wondering where the hell we been so long.”  As we left that subway station, it rained down on us.  Strange Rain.  “(missing song lyrics for copyright reasons)”  Sometimes I’d lack in faith, and I’d ask John about how he had so much all the time and everything.  He said he thought maybe I’d have to stand in front of that train sometime if I wanted more of it.  Or maybe that he was just an idiot.  I asked him why he thought so many people didn’t believe in God or hated God so much.  He said, sometimes, people hate who loves them the most.  And God was a black woman of course.  That she had been here once again, her name was Arethra Franklin then.  He said that most people didn’t know they needed God or just were too busy or just didn’t need God enough.  And it didn’t help that most of us were such idiots most of the time.  He said we are Gods idiot step-children.  I asked him why God loves idiots so much.  He said, I’d have to ask Him myself one day, but it’s probably that were all just Gods children. 

The days are difficult for me some times and I don’t need or search for God most of the time.  Most of the time I don’t believe.  I have never had a true experience of God that wasn’t built up perhaps artificially.  Who the fuck knows man.  But if I’d like to know one day and that’s all that drives me.  The shit prophet told me, he said, “One day I may just have to stand in front of a train to meet God, and same with everyone else.  Or something like it.”  “But I think you’ll meet God in the ocean Joe Doyle.” “The shit prophet, what a guy, what a God damned guy!”