- Good to see ya! How have you been, matey?
- I'm doing OK now Andy, thanks... Now that I found Our Lord Jesus Christ.
(a moment of silence, and consternation rapidly takes over Andy's normally chirpy facial expression)
Erm... (hoping it's a piss-take but then diplomatically not wanting to offend me in case it isn't and sort of waiting for me to disarm this) Erm...
Of course I didn't. If I ever find religion and you have reasons to believe I'm not joking, please have me put down. But I did find Our Lord Jesus Christ.
Blimey, mate, you got me worried, what happened?
Well, it went like this...
One Friday evening after a very much uneventful week I was once again on my way back from the pub, and naturally once again I was pished. So unfortunately it was another failure this time - but I'll get over it, I thought to myself - I'll procrastinate for a bit now, do whatever next week, burn a gallon of midnight oil when some forgotten deadline comes a-looming, thus making me some money, and I'll start over.
I'd gotten used to those failures so much by then that it didn't even phase me much, so despite everything I was still in a decent mood, and the season was definitely helping. It was a lovely June evening, everything bursting with bloom and foliage and scent, some mental nightingale going at it full tilt, all of that made me feel almost at home. I swear, if I walked past someone's garden that had honeysuckles in it, I would roll in them like a cat in catnip and snort the last part per million out of them.
What was I talking about...? Ah, yes.
There is a disused bus shelter midway, with a well-weathered bench that apparently now mainly serves as a perch for the local starlings, and with appropriately voided signage. Sitting on that bench was a person. He was sort of middle-aged-ish as far as I could tell, sandals, linen trousers that at one point might have passed for beige. An intellectual I would wager, I asserted jokingly as I panned-and-scanned in the upward direction and stopped to admire his full beard that my follicles could never possibly issue, but I soon thanked myself that wager I didn't.
The chap was wearing a huge sombrero with its rim folded up at the front and held with some yellow-and-green electrical tape, and said sombrero was evidently shit-stained all over. How did I conclude this? Well, not necessarily shit-stained, but in any case it was covered with thick, brown, textured, crusty finger smudges. I preferred therefore to assume it was shit, simply to stay safe and maintain distance. He was also wearing a faded, blue t-shirt that said "Someone went to Benidorm in 2001 and all I got was this soddin' thing". Bit of a mix really. And this takes me back to the trousers. Simply impossible to overlook was also The Bulge. No, it wasn't a hard-on, but a true, gigantic bulge, one that would definitely put David Bowie in The Labyrinth to shame, one that songs might have been written about and had this been some centuries earlier, probably would have led to the invention of the codpiece, out of nothing but pure envy. The man wasn't asleep as such, but he was breathing heavily through his nose like a steam engine and staring blankly into the abyss that apparently lay ahead. He wasn't tipsy or even half cut. He was near-comatose trollied.
As I took this all in, my state suddenly took over without as much as waiting a bit for either a nod of permission or a hand-waving denial, or even a shrug. Something in me made a loud "ding!" - poor impulse control, remember - and without much fear or consideration I decided: let the brain-fuckery commence! I mustered the best Scottish patter I could gather at short notice, all those years of watching Still Game, Burnistoun and Limmy's Show condensed into one short burst, and it wasn't just words and accent mind you, it was a full-on transmogrification; (in) my mind (I) was channeling Glasgow straight through an eerie, glimmering portal of floating wreck the hoose juice bottle shards. So I came closer, all transmogrified, and I says to him "Ya all right pal? Yer not fe roon here are ya? Are ya lost?" - in what I had hoped would surely be construed as a prelude to a mugging - and then... He somehow came out of it, and not the sort of drunken trial-and-error in and out focus hunting one would normally attempt in his apparent state. Best I can describe it is that he crystallised - he went from Nobody Home to Summicron in a fraction of a second, now focused dead on on my Great Unibrow of Self-neglect, and he didn't overshoot; this was intentional. He was now looking straight into me with the bluest pair of eyes so piercing I could feel his manky nails scratching at the back of my skull. And then came The Voice - a booming, perfect RP that could probably administer death by hymn. And out came "IT IS YOU WHO IS LOST, MY CHILD, BUT NOW YOU ARE FOUND, FOR I AM THE LORD JESUS CHRIST".
I was stumped. Here I thought I was the one controlling this, but now I got somehow unknowingly pulled into the twilight zone of someone else's making, like a tit. I heckled him a bit in my mind, cocky fucker I thought, calling himself THE lord and that. But I'm game, I thought ...aaand before I managed to respond, the man reached into his trousers, not the pockets but, he went straight for The Bulge, struggling with it a bit at first. Now I don't mind some drunken banter, but a pervy? Fuck this; abort! And as I'm almost walking away, he pulls it out. It's a blue, zero grammage Gideons bible, like one you'd find in the bedside drawers of a B&B whose owner just assumes the whole world is Christian or at least it should be. It is as crusty as his sombrero and as he skims through it, I can see side notes.
And then, Jesus starts reading a passage, and I can't bear the thought of this tainting my eardrums, so I walk on, like a common, yellow coward.
#
As much as I was relieved that he wasn't an obvious pervy, I was also somewhat disappointed that no manageable verbal challenge came out of it, at least not one I could or wanted to take on that evening.
I was now a good hundred yards away and the warm, evening air still carried his voice, the nightingale having had fucked off in panic by then.
As I turned into my mews, I shook my head and said to myself: I really need to get my life in order or one day this could be me.
A sobering thought indeed. And somehow, it helped.
- So yes, I'm doing OK now, now that I found Our Lord Jesus Christ.