The Fifth Gospel

Jim Stacey is no gentleman, as will soon be evident to the reader, so perhaps he is deserving of misfortune. His attitude does not spawn from any real traumatic childhood or the fact that he spent most of his teenage years playing violent video games. And it isn’t that he was forced to go to church every Sunday until his parents were fed up with dragging him along, nor has it anything to do with the fact that he is an only child. Frankly, Jim Stacey is, pure and simple, a jerk. But while his brazen and tenacious attitude has always existed, it is not until one fateful summer that he makes the decision that will drastically affect the rest of his life.

We join Jim Stacey as he is about to lose his seventh girlfriend to date. He will soon come to the conclusion that, after long-term testing, she is not in fact ‘The One.’ This wouldn’t seem so surprising if, say, you were even so much as an acquaintance of his, for it happens frequently. However were they prepared to work this dispute out, eventually going on to marriage and children, the combination of their DNA would produce a child with a one in four chance of having sickle cell disease. In light of this, perhaps it is best to chalk this up to simply subconscious survival of the fittest. Or maybe it is just Jim’s ill-timed, tactless remark that starts the avalanche.

“I just said it --- you need clothes that fit your body.”

It is the summer of his thirteenth year. The scene is in Alexis Taylor’s bedroom, a cramped room of pastels and frills, harkening wholly back to her childhood and serving as the stage for this deeply moving break-up. Imagine the bed, covered in a giant fluffy pink comforter, dotted with stuffed animals, and simple brushed steel poles surrounding the perimeter; the holly-veneered dresser, overstuffed and covered with essentials, and matching vanity mirror, stands against the opposite wall. The closet doors are closed and there are no windows, which may explain the feeling of drama hanging thickly in the air. A single 40 watt bulb illuminates the room from above, giving everything a sickly urine-like tint.

“I can’t believe you just said that! Why don’t you just go flirt with Emily again, she’s thin!”

Alexis is a rather ordinary girl, with chemically highlighted hair that she believes makes her look “hotter,” as though temperature were an indication of sex appeal. Her hobbies include watching TV shows about boys, writing in her diary about boys, and talking to her like-minded friends about boys. Jim Stacey is lanky, acne-riddled, and largely preoccupied with himself.

“And I can’t believe you’re still pissed about that... that was like, two weeks ago.” Jim Stacey has reason to be upset. After all, he had this same argument with Alexis two weeks ago. Though it threatens his prepubescent masculinity, a pang of regret stabs at his heart as he realizes he might never again get to lie on that bed of pink and frills. He does not admit it to anyone, but he rather liked its comfortable girlish modern charm.

“You haven’t heard a thing I’ve said, have you?” Alexis’ voice carries pretty far, and her habit of carelessly leaving her bedroom door open, accounting for numerous awkward walk-ins and walk-bys for her entire family, means that her father, attempting to read the paper in the living room, can hear it all happening quite clearly --- at least the side of the argument that matters. He never really cared for that Stacey boy anyway, and, from the safety of his evening chair, silently roots for his daughter, making a mental note that they grow up far too quickly for their own good.

Jim rolls his eyes and Alexis crosses her arms more severely. There is a moment of monolithic silence as each waits for the inevitable, and the suspense would probably be at record highs right now if we did not already know the outcome. Alexis can see flashes of their time together, like when she sat for six hours at his place watching him replay the same part of some video game twenty-seven times because “it was a disgrace as a gamer to get a score that low,” or the time when Jim drug her to the movies to watch some retarded guy talk about sex and his missing car for an hour and thirty minutes. Scrunching up her nose, Alexis is forced to ask herself why this hadn’t happened sooner and just how much of her life up to this point could have been better spent. Jim is trying to think of a way he could leave brusquely and yet still take that pink frilly pillow. Figuring that it is impossible to do without calling attention to it, he abandons that line of thought and returns to trying to discern out of the corner of his eye which of the drawers in her dresser contains her underwear.

Curiously enough, twenty-seven is exactly the number of girlfriends Jim Stacey will have to go through before settling down. The only reason this miracle number twenty-eight will actually say yes is due to an emotionally abusive family life and a submissively nurtured personality. That and the fact that Jim will have a once-in-a-lifetime change of heart just prior to meeting her.

And so it goes. Alexis dumps Jim flat out and most unceremoniously, taking only five minutes of crying afterwards to come to the conclusion that he isn’t worth her tears, and calls her best friend Margo, a chubby Filipino girl of similar age and mentality, though possessing far fewer boyfriend stories (read: none) but making up for it with her determination to listen and provide unsubstantiated yet markedly encouraging advice when needed. It is about this time, having eyed Jim as he left brusquely, that Alexis’ father comes and knocks lightly on her still wide open door. Age thirty-nine, Charles Taylor is a happily married man with a steady paycheck and a left leg that is longer than his right, giving him a characteristically endearing way of walking. He has only one daughter, who he now offers his wisdom to, only to be told, in not so few words, that it is not needed, and he is left to reflect on the matter as he lies down to bed that night, wondering what a whiny Flip who eats too much could know that he doesn’t.

Jim Stacey learns a valuable lesson. He realizes that girls are far more challenging than Yar’s Revenge or any of his other Atari games. However, they are not insurmountable. His problem is that he is just too awesome of a guy. He will find the worthy woman yet. Little does he know that behind the scenes fate will be spinning her web against his favor! A most curious series of events is about to unfold.

It would seem, on a cursory glance, that the drastic, life-changing decision was to abandon video games in favor of girls, when, in fact, it was more about the revelatory epiphany Jim had as he was walking back to his house. He stopped by a nearby convenience store, the same one he would later work at eight years later, to get a drink. Something with caffeine, he thought. He was in the process of paying for it, handing his change to the scraggly night-worker behind the register, when he saw a naked man run across the street out the front windows.

“Jesus. A streaker.”

“Come again?” said the hard-of-hearing man who Jim wouldn’t have been surprised to find living in a cardboard box.

“Oh nothing. Nevermind.”

He was walking outside, with his freshly opened bottle of caffeinated soft-drink, that the words “Jesus” and “Come again?” kept rolling through his mind. Walking up the steps to his front door twenty minutes later, Jim Stacey finally knew what the point of his existence was on Earth, even beyond chasing girls. It went far beyond simply spreading his greatness through progeny. Yet it wasn’t without some work.

He would need to rewrite the Bible.

In the beginning, there is passion. Jim writes and writes, formulates and theorizes. It is truly a marvel of an undertaking, especially for just one teen. Throughout his entire junior high and high school life he works, gradually losing that initial drive that had sped him through the necessary revisions of Genesis and Exodus. It is about the time he is faced with the decision of including the New Testament or not that he grows distant and aloof from his great work. Fickle is the human heart.

Actually, it is fairly well abandoned after he discovers sex. Nevertheless, the great amounts of time he had devoted on such a fruitless endeavor results in a history of bad grades, zero community or club activity, and nothing to show potential employers or universities. In fact, his family just about gives up all hope of him amounting to much more than a couch potato. He would, however, mention his great work again in a dark room with some nameless hooker while thumbing through twenties he would have found in his father’s Italian leather wallet. On his twelfth beer, Jim would slur something about him being the next Jesus, followed by an exclamation of “Holy cow!” as the hooker would display her all-natural, silicone-enhanced breasts.

Sex is definitely his passion as he approaches his second year as a high-school senior. Rather, fornication to be more precise.

“I just don’t, yanno, see any reason to apply myself when I’m obviously so far above this,” he tells his eighteenth girlfriend as they watch from the bleachers the other students make their final walk. Number 18 is a high school dropout too; she works at the local Laundromat, smokes two packs a day, and, according to all previous and current boyfriends, gives killer blowjobs to boot. And the best part is she doesn’t charge for them, either, making her definite ‘The One’-candidate material. Jim allows her to spit instead of swallow, figuring that it is probably less disrespectful than eating his potential offspring. One of the first changes he had made to his Bible was the celibacy of Jesus --- that had been done away with entirely, in favor of him spreading his greatness as much as possible.

James Henry and Margaret Lou Stacey, age forty-eight and forty-five respectively, are insecure parents and devout Catholics of equal time. The prospects of children had brought grave fears that only the most successful self-help book in history could remedy, for, after all, they wouldn’t call them “Fathers” if they didn’t know something about being a parent. All fears had been realized, however, the first time they got a call from Jim’s pre-school teacher. Jim wouldn’t share with the other kids, Jim wouldn’t listen to the teacher, Jim wasn’t learning the material --- it was time, said the middle-aged, soft-spoken, Caucasian woman, for a conference. This same phone call would echo throughout most of Jim’s future school life until the teachers stopped caring enough to single him out from the whole. By now his parents feel powerless. Their pastor is stumped. Jim is too busy coming up with some better commandments, a process that takes many years due to his innate proclivity towards procrastination.

The tension steadily increases, but it isn’t until his twenty-first birthday that his parents finally kick him out and tell him not to come back until he has something to show for himself. It is now up to him to show the world what Jim Stacey is made of.

We now join Jim Stacey as he is about to lose his job, after only holding it for three weeks. He had decided that his run for governor would never get off the ground without a little funding, so he had applied for a job at a nearby gas station. While this exposes him to much of the riff-raff that frequently needs gasoline to survive, Jim writes it off as a “humbling” experience. This nets him minimum wage and qualifies him for welfare, which he accepts immediately. After all, it is the least the country can do.

He had landed the job purely on charm, for his coffee-and-cigarettes casual attitude and mannerisms give people the impression that he is a friendly and genial guy. This initial inclination in people is thoroughly shattered after spending more than thirteen minutes in his presence. Luckily for Jim, his manager would rarely be spending time in Jim’s presence long enough for him to realize what a drastic mistake he had made.

Jim’s proclivity for unlikely events begins as he is the unfortunate victim of a police sting. Not trusting Jim’s goatee-fuzz and uninterested disposition, Chief Officer Vince Cavaletti has Liza, his attractive daughter of seventeen, attempt to purchase cigarettes. Finding her to be more than attractive, Jim flirts with Liza.

“Yanno, I, ah... I’m writing a novel as we speak. It’s based on a popular myth, in fact. I’ve got about --- oh I don’t know, a thousand pages written so far. I should let you read it sometime at my place in my bed with the lights out, if you catch my drift.”

Liza smiles and plays along like her daddy requested she do, even leaning in close and letting Jim’s eyes explore her underage yet, nevertheless, enticing curves. While completely unrelated to this story, it is interesting to note that Liza would later use this same technique many times in life to take full advantage of her male counterparts.

Jim sells her a pack of unfiltereds, whereupon he has the humbling experience of metal around his wrists. Jim’s manager is furious.

“I can’t believe you fucking sold a pack of cigarettes to a minor --- didn’t I tell you to card them? Jesus, are you deaf?”

Jim sighs. “I really don’t see why he would send his own voluptuous daughter in here and not expect me to bend to her every whim. I mean, tempt not lest ye be serious, right? Not that I always succumb to desire, but... but really, who does that?”

“Don’t you get it? It was a sting operation! A setup! Jesus fucking Christ!”

Jim allows the distraught man to pepper him with spittle for a few more minutes, lamenting inside another missed opportunity with the fairer sex due to interference from his own team. Liza gone, and Number Twenty marked off the list, he would have to continue his search elsewhere. Before continuing, however, Jim is required to attend court, with explicit instructions from that same frenzied manager to claim entrapment and plea-bargain for the lightest fine. It would be very costly to their business should they lose their license to sell tobacco. Inevitably, things would go far worse than expected.

“I’d, ah, like to request that I represent myself. I feel that there really is no better person to do it. Four years of law school doesn’t really make you Jim Stacey.”

Slam goes the judge’s gavel. It makes Jim jump slightly, but he sits back down anyway. The courtroom is old but well kept, and has a sort of golden wood glow to it. It is functional without being outlandish, and currently contains only a few select people involved in the case dotting the pews. There is no jury, but there is no need to waste anyone else’s time. Jim Stacey sits to one side with his distraught manager and wears a mildly irritated look on his face. He can’t help but think how closely this resembles some of the trials Jesus purportedly faced, and that they would make very good modern examples to further illustrate his true nature. The judge’s voice suddenly booms across the room.

“James Kenneth Stacey, you are hereby charged with the sale of tobacco to a minor. Do you understand the charges against you?”

“Look, if the rabble of our society wants to slowly kill themselves, why stop ‘em? I mean, it’s pretty much just population control. Making suicide a sin was a huge mistake, if you ask me.”

Slam goes the judge’s gavel. As fate would have it, the judge is a humorless aging African American man who just so happens to have dealt with Jim in a past civil case involving missing wedding rings, an irate groom and bride, and the former friend and best man Jim Stacey. His graying beard frames a sour disposition, and his archaic but customary long black robes do little to camouflage his steadily expanding gut, due mostly to poor eating habits and a reduced metabolism as a result of his age. Much like Officer Vince Cavaletti, he doesn’t like Jim’s vexed disposition.

Jim decides to take a moment to clarify both his throat and the use of his full name.

“Yanno, I really just reserve my full name for use by higher beings. And my mom. But mostly higher beings.”

Had Jim noticed the dark scowl upon the judge’s face, he might not have continued. Of course, he may very well have continued anyway in spite. Irregardless, continue he did, in that same casual, matter-of-fact manner.

“Speaking of which, it seems rather odd to me that anyone but a higher being would attempt to fathom my actions. I think you’ll agree that an ordinary man such as yourself just isn’t in any position to judge Jim Stacey. If anything, it should really be me up there wearing those robes.”

Slam goes the jail cell gate.

We join our fledgling inmate during his 90-day stay at the local penitentiary, which just so happens to have recently won the Safest Prison award in the entire state (and which could have also won Most Boring, if you asked any of the detainees.) Jim shares a plain gray cell with an overweight guy of mixed European descent who isn’t much older than Jim. After some inquiry he introduces himself as simply “Tank.” Tank has a curious manner of speech, in which his plodding tone consistently sounds questioning (which Jim takes as uncertainty whether he is saying it right or not), and a most bizarre habit of spacing out in the middle of the day, leaving Jim painfully bored with his own thoughts. Whenever he isn’t spacing out, Jim attempts to communicate with Tank on a layman’s level, if only a method of relief from counting the number of cinderblocks in the wall for the umpteenth time.

Conversations frequently go like this:

“So, ah, whaddaya, yanno... do for a living?”

“Well... I kinda experimented for awhile... with huffing?”

A long pause would follow, lasting until Jim figures out Tank isn’t going to continue going anywhere with that. Jim would usually try to change the subject.

“The smell in here is positively reprehensible.”

“I heard like... the janitor uses Lysol...? We should totally try to like... gank some?”

Ad nauseam.

Jim quickly catches on that Tank isn’t the sharpest shooter in the platoon.

Jim also learns a lot of insights into the common man’s existence, such as how confinement pushes men to extremes, how communal showers do little to inspire fellowship and more to instill the pecking order, but mostly how god damn boring it is. He doesn’t much care for the food, either, but there are more pressing matters.

“I’ve gotten far too many, er, offers... for... for sexual intercourse with other men than I’d rather get in, yanno, a millennium.”

Actually, this is a complete lie, another thing Jim had removed from the list of ways to sin due to its extreme usefulness. It is so useful in fact that lying is exactly what actually got Jim out of jail room sex. A prime target for becoming a bitch receiver and after heatedly tossing reasons to the contrary (even going so far as to drop the AIDS-bomb, yet that hadn’t seemed to phase the hulking horny monster one bit), Jim had exclaimed that he was a plague victim from Guatemala --- the flesh eating virus to be exact.

“I got to like... smell a girl’s cooch once...?” came Tank’s plodding intonations.

“...Y-You don’t say...”

“Yeah... this one time, in high school, I like... snuck into the girl’s basketball team’s locker room... an’ like... hid there... until they came in...? I saw a ton of titties man, it was wicked...”

“You’re, ah, quite the sneaky pervert aren’t you?”

“The superintendent was like... the girl’s basketball team captain’s dad? Yeah... he was pretty pissed... he kinda pressed charges? I dunno...”

Jim finds this to be ripe for use in his book. Tank clearly is the foolish and misguided but probably good-natured modern Paul. Right now he’s still more like Saul, but his turn-around will come soon, of that Jim is sure. Figuring he needed a good divine push, Jim presses a few buttons.

“Is that why you’re in here, fouling my air with your bodily stench?”

“Nah... I got caught smokin’ a joint outside the movie theater...”

“Yanno, it’s poor schmucks like you that really prove to me there is no God.”

Of course his words had been completely blasphemous, but Jim had long since learned that a little white lie here and there could be a very good motivator. Jim finds it quite disrespectful to come across Tank, suspended by the bed sheets in a makeshift noose, hanging dead in the middle of his cell the next morning. He hadn’t even left a letter or anything remotely dramatic. But since that could easily be spruced up some with a little creativity, and since suicide could be an interesting twist in the new life of Paul, Jim decides to make a mental note for later.

At last we join Jim Stacey as he stumbles upon the girl of his dreams. His ninety days up, he emerges once more into the world and stumbles quite literally into said girl as he is walking out a free man. She would be Number 27, after several failed ‘The Ones’ seen in passing on TV during his jail sentence. She ends up breaking her neck, having rolled down the long concrete steps in front of the jail house. Hoping to convert her over to his side, Jim does the courtesy of calling the ambulance and, with nowhere else to really go, rides to the hospital with her, claiming to be a relative and/or close friend.

The hospital is small, a mere hundred beds, with an overworked staff and outdated equipment. The building used to be an elementary school, and the familiar classrooms, since turned into double-occupancy patient rooms, line the long hallways that extend in either direction from the main entrance. The dream girl, now dreaming herself, is led to emergency care, and Jim waits patiently outside in the cafeteria. Well, it is now a sort of lobby. He takes a seat near an octogenarian, who, with slight fuzz extending from the canals of his droopy ears, sizes Jim up and smiles politely.

“I’m waitin’ on my wife...”

“Oh yeah?”
“She’s gettin’ a mammogram...”

“That’s where they squeeze her tits, right?”

The old man chuckles. “Yeah, that’s right.”

This would be the last time the old man would be visiting the hospital for someone other than himself.

While Jim is shaking disturbing images of an eighty year-old woman’s withered sacks, he is greeted by a cute nurse in blue scrubs. By sheer coincidence, she happens to be a very distant and obscure cousin of Jim’s, though neither of them knows it. She does feel a slight subconscious affinity to him, though it may just be that she hasn’t spent thirteen minutes in Jim’s presence yet.

“Are you the one who came in with the neck injury?”

“No, my neck is functioning quite well thank you.”

“I mean the lady.” She smiles. “Are you the husband?”

“I’ve yet to achieve that status, but I will be when she wakes up.”

“Oh, quite the romancer, huh? Well, you can see her now. She’s conscious again. Follow me.”

Jim leaves the old man and follows the nurse through the crowded hallway, dodging doctors, aides, and technicians. She leads him into one of the rooms, clearly labeled “ICU,” and Jim notices the chalkboard still attached to the far wall. It has numerous notes and patient data scribbled upon its worn shale surface. The nearest bed is empty. The far one contains that same striking woman Jim had inadvertently forever changed the life of as he was making his hasty exit.

The woman lies limp, pale and exhausted from the ordeal, with her long golden curls swimming around her slight frame. A white brace covers her neck, preventing her from turning her head at all. Jim imagines her ruby lips interlocking around his and eagerly approaches her bed. She is truly an exquisite specimen. Unlike Mary Magdalene, she is not happy to see Jim. In fact, one might even describe her reaction as ‘a volcanic explosion of rage amidst a thunderstorm,’ but that would just be far too poetic for even Jim’s tastes. It takes both nurses and the doctor to hold her down as she claws the air reaching for Jim’s throat. At that moment, a muscle-laden man with a buzz cut and two tattoos snaking down each of his bulging biceps walks in wearing an orange jumpsuit exactly like the one Jim had on not three hours prior. The man notes the berserk woman and the object of her hostility and cracks his knuckles audibly.

“You the asshole who hurt my wife!” he blurts.

“Whoa, wrong room, eh? I really should be going, maybe it was the one next doo--- careful buddy! There’s more kung-fu in these guns than you can imagine! I’ll have you know I can bench press my truc---”

Not waiting any longer, the hulking man allows his balled fist to connect cleanly with Jim’s flapping jaw. Even if Jim had brought a slingshot it wouldn’t have saved him from this Goliath.

“Looks like it’ll have to be twenty more years!” he screams, making it his battle cry. The police officer escort, who had stationed himself outside the door, rushes in, calls for backup, and joins the fray, club wielded.

We join Jim Stacey as he awakens from his three-year coma. By a pure twist of fate, Jim is subject to a gross clerical error. It seems that when he was admitted to that same hospital, after being beaten severely, that they had mixed up his files with someone else’s who just so happened to be suffering from a similar condition and even had a similar hairstyle. Aside from receiving a penicillin-alternative, nothing particularly noteworthy had resulted as a cause until he woke up.

It is now, with doctor and nurse nearby, that the effects of that gross clerical error come to pass, for, due to the severe head trauma, Jim suffers from permanent amnesia.

“Frank... Frank, can you hear me?”

Mumbling incomprehensible syllables, Jim blinks several times, allowing his eyes to adjust to the harsh overhead classroom lights. He finally replies with a hesitant yes, to the great relief of the nurse and doctor, and calls are made to release Frank Bowman from care.

Emerging from ICU after rehabilitation, Jim, or rather Frank, attempts to pick up where he left off in the world, returning to his apartment in the city and coming in to work (they still had his old position available) at 8:30AM the next morning. As the people began to trickle in to the quaint little church, some of them were astonished to see what might have been the Frank Bowman they remember.

“Father Bowman! ...Is that you?”

“Yes, I’ve returned. I feel like a new man too. But it’s time for me to continue my work spreading the gospel. I just had a great idea in fact --- a book idea... it seems like something I’ve wanted to complete for a long time now.”

He is just about to continue explaining when Number 28 walks in.

We will not be joining the real Frank Bowman, for, after the mix-up, he is the unfortunate victim of an escaped convict’s personal vendetta.

-- Written in late 2005 for my Creative Writing Fiction class. Very experimental style for me. I had a lot of fun writing it, that’s for sure. Always meant to revamp it some more... --