NEW JESUS CHRIST THE NJ YEARS SNEAK PREVIEW! - CHAPTERS 5-11

The skies over the San Juan Islands were as clear as the picture on a high-definition television.  As Tallmadge eased the pastel green Cessna to an altitude low enough to permit a bird’s eye view, Lennie could see a large school of dolphin gracefully arcing over the waves, gulls flying in formation directly above the dolphins, and the ferry boat Yakima, whooshing its way through choppy seas toward Shaw Island.  Snapshots like these reminded Leibowitz why he’d left New Jersey for the Pacific Northwest more than 30 years ago. 
Chapter 5
Dr. Whim

After Dr. Wimberley W. Stout had dabbled in the occult, obtained a PhD in archeology from a diploma mill he created and operated from a wireless Internet access point on top one of the highest peaks in the Appalachian Mountains, he was ready to move on to the next phase of his life.   After a failed attempt to patent a design for a paprika-flavored condom that would make a woman choke during oral sex (the fact that few people wear condoms when they’re about get a blowjob hadn’t occurred to Dr. Whim) — Stout decided to turn his self-described massive intellect to religious skullduggery.  

 A tall, solidly built man with a large, bald oval-shaped skull that would have been the spitting image of the head of a penis, had it not been graced by a wispy moustache that might have been hand-drawn by a makeup pencil, the fake doctor had found the Pacific Northwest fertile ground for freaks like him.  And the wannabe academician knew that the Waste Dump Jesus presented a 24-karat opportunity to end a lifetime of failure and obscurity.

Bald Knob, West Virginia

From his perch on the summit of Bald Knob, 4842 feet above sea level, Old Jamie had found it mighty inconvenient to have to go into Durbin, West Virginia and rub shoulders with all the ski freaks, just so he could go to Billie Camerman’s house to stock up on some of her homemade coffee liqueur that tasted a lot like that Mexican stuff in the fancy bottle.

He’d go into town a few times a week during the summer, and bring back several one-gallon jugs of the home brew during each trip.  Bald Knob was often a cold, wet foreboding place, with annual precipitation of 60 inches and more than 12 feet of snow.  Temperatures reached as low as 40 below zero during the long winter, which sometimes ran from early October through early May.  Old Jamie would drink Billie’s liqueur the way most folks drank water.

The 150-proof brew that warmed Old Jamie’s gullet during Bald Knob’s frigid winters, had become his only vice since he’d given up the rough and tumble world of prison sex.  The minute the gates of Sing Sing Prison had swung open to Old Jamie after 5 years of confinement in a cell that was no bigger than an office cubicle, the rotund felon kissed that life goodbye.  He quickly found gainful employment tending Doc Wimberley’s Internet access point (and diploma mill) high atop cold, foreboding Snyder Knob.  

“What’s it like to rub bungs with a guy?” was the first question Wimberley Stout had asked at the job interview. 

“If you’re aiming to find that out from this old boy, you might as well kiss that ugly turd-faced head of yours goodbye, cause I’m gonna knock it from  your shoulders,” Old Jamie said while using his booger-stained middle finger to pick some dog food bits from between his few remaining teeth.

“Why the hell does it smell like dog food in here?” was question number two.

Curiously, the doctor didn’t fear Old Jamie one bit, despite the fact that OJ weighed about 450 pounds soaking wet (and he was always soaking wet because he never stopped sweating, even when the temperature was 15 degrees and the wicked wind was howling).

“I don’t think you can compee-hend just how fast this fat old boy can move, Dr. Whim.” Old Jamie said.

“You want a job or not, hotshot?”

Met with a glower and a yawn, Dr. Wimberley Stout took Old Jamie’s silence as a “yes.”

Chapter 6

Dwight Beckley

Dwight had to do a couple of double-takes at the caller ID, which read FORT STOCKTON, TEXAS, before he picked up the call from Lennie Leibowitz.  

“Lennie?”

“Shhhh.  Don’t say anything more.  I don’t have time to reminisce, Dwight. I’m going to send snail mail to your office.  In it, you’ll find everything you need to know.

“After 35 years – a letter?  What’s this all about? ”

“Read the letter, Dwight.”

Click.

 The men whose paths crossed on an Interstate highway in New Mexico, then led them to a jail cell in Fort Stockton, Texas, had never spoken since -- until Leibowitz’ puzzling phone call.  Over the years, Beckley had resisted the temptation to call his famous former cellmate dozens of times, but was sure that Lennie wouldn’t remember him.  Lennie had also wanted to look Dwight up, but didn’t give the notion much freight until the Internet came into play, making it possible to quickly find almost anyone. 

Lennie had a hunch that the personable and resourceful Beckley had made a good life for himself.  So he wasn’t surprised to discover that Dwight had replaced the legendary Red Adair as the world’s foremost oil-well firefighter.  Unlike Adair, Beckley hadn’t taken a hands-on approach to the daunting task of controlling raging oil-fed fires that were almost impossible to stanch. 

As CEO of Earlwell Extinguishment Enterprises, Beckley had teams of ex-roughnecks, petroleum engineers, scientists, and bean counters to take care of day-to-day matters.  Dwight spent his time courting clients and politicians, while surreptitiously spearheading an enormous agenda of charitable endeavors, all undertaken anonymously.  Beckley’s foundations attempted to relieve a stunning variety of human miseries, fulfilling the benefactor’s lifelong quest to do a little bit of good in the world.  For every dollar Dwight Beckley earned, he gave 75 cents to causes he believed in.  The quarters that he kept for himself and his family added up to many millions of dollars.

Chapter 7

Orcas Island, Washington 
August 12^th approximately 4 a.m.

While awaiting the arrival of the Waste Dump Jesus, Lennie scrawled a short to-do list on a yellow legal pad, a sure sign that his most recent southward emotional spiral had begun to creep northward, as he looked outward from his glass-walled writer’s studio toward Puget Sound, then upward at the August sky; still blue even though it was 9:30 p.m.

1. Get laid
2. Start exercising
3. Feed the damn cat
4. Save the old man
5. Mail the letter to Beckley

Although often imprisoned by depression, Lennie always rose to the occasion when under the influence of a particularly dire circumstance.  He theorized that fear or anger triggered enough of an adrenaline rush to jump-start in his brain the outflow of that happy juice known as serotonin.   Otherwise, he’d never been able to “snap out of it,” an expression Lennie and almost everyone who had experienced depression had come to loathe. 

“Snap out of your fucking wheelchair, you goddamned dwarf,” Lennie had said 3 years ago in response to his bookie and good friend, Snugs Harper; drawing only a smirk from the diminutive paraplegic who’d grown tired of Leibowitz’ frequently dark moods.

Harper learned his lesson. He never told Lennie to snap out of it again.  In fact, Snugs kissed the 30-year friendship goodbye that day, having drawn enough foul words from Lennie over the years to last the rest of his lifetime.  

6.  Apologize to Snugs

Lennie’s list would have been much longer, but if he was to make it to Snoqualmie Pass in time to prepare his cabin for the old man’s arrival, he’d better get his butt to the Orcas Island Airport where his 4-seat Cessna and pilot Russ Tallmadge were ready for takeoff.  Tallmadge had been Lennie’s pilot, chauffeur and personal assistant since Leibowitz had won fame & fortune as a best-selling author and motivational speaker.  Although he kept up his medical certifications by enrolling in as many online Continuing Medical Education courses as he could, Lennie practiced medicine only when friends and relatives needed his attention

 Just a couple years out of residency, Lennie had written an absurd book as a dare after he’d lost his shirt in a poker game, along with his gold Rolex watch and the deed to a shabby little condo he owned in South Florida.  

“You’re always talking about that great American novel you’re gonna write, doc,” the holder of the winning hand declared. “Write me a book in 72 hours, and if it makes me laugh I’ll give you back the watch.”

 The product of Lennie Leibowitz’ labors, The Human Intestines: An Allegory of the Universe, eventually sold more than 15-million copies worldwide and was printed in 27 different languages.  Sales of the parody of New Age wisdom crossed virtually every demographic over the age of 14.  Many New Agers, who took the book as gospel from a very wise and funny man, quoted Lennie’s words with as much passion as Bible thumpers cite arcane passages from the New Testament.  In fact, “The Human Intestines," came to be known as The New Age Testament.

Chapter 8
Getting Laid

To a wealthy widower with an athletic body and occasional charm, getting laid wasn’t much different from playing a game of darts.  Aim at the target and register the score.  At age 58, hitting a bull’s eye was out of the question, so Lennie settled for the darts that landed around the periphery.    Just for the hell of it, he’d actually designed a dartboard whose concentric circles corresponded to the women he’d encountered over the years.  In the bull’s eye was a tiny photo of a woman named Jessica Sherry, whom he’d known and loved for more than 20 years.

 On those occasions when an errant dart landed in Jessica, he’d walk slowly to the board and pull the dart out.  He hadn’t felt like grabbing a dart for several months, but now that the whole Jesus thing was in play, his senses were sharp and his body restless for some activity.  He figured he had a couple of minutes to spare before heading out to the airport.  Lennie opened a desk drawer, grabbed a small mahogany box and set it on the desk.  Taking a deep breath, he opened the box and withdrew a hand-carved ivory dart with an 18-karat gold point and flung it backwards toward the dartboard that was 15 feet away, directly behind him.

A couple of minutes later he was on the phone:

“Jess…can you meet me at Snoqualmie?”

This time Lennie hadn’t pulled the dart out.

****

Chapter 9 Jess
Jess Sherry wouldn’t be caught dead in public without her platform shoes, because she’d always wanted to be 6’2, rather than the 5-foot, 11-inch runt of a family of clumsy giants, known in their Bishop, California neighborhood as the Stumbling Sequoias.  Jessica’s dad, Murray Sherry played semi-pro basketball for 15 years, tallying a total of 7 points in the 1000 games in which he appeared, being better known for throwing elbows than draining jump shots.

Dubbed “007” to match his scoring average, the 7-foot 3-inch Murray Sherry pulled a disappearing act in 1968, when Jessica was 3 years old.  He resurfaced in 1985, claiming he’d fallen under the hypnotic powers of a rowdy cult of  Zoroastrian midgets, who led him and 38 other tall people to Tonopah, Nevada. 

“All they wanted was my body, Mary.  And I was willing give them my soul,” Murray told Jessica’s mother as he begged her to take him back so they could resume their marital relations.

Mary didn’t buy Murray’s story, thinking it extremely unlikely that their lives hadn’t intersected in the 17 years he’d been away from home.  She loved to drive the 160 miles from Bishop to Tonopah’s tacky casino, and made the trip at least twice a month.  She figured it would have been pretty hard to hide a community of midgets and giants in such a small town.

A split-second after Murray mumbled his carefully rehearsed story of abduction and repeated sexual violation, Mary decked him with a leaping right cross to the Adam’s Apple and told him to take the next bus back to Tonopah.  Murray Sherry hasn’t been heard from since.

 Jessica’s six older brothers (Terry, Barry, Harry, Gary, Jerry, and Cary) all remained in the Eastern Sierra, each retiring after spending more than 30 years as a security guard for the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power.  They whiled away their careers standing watch over the DWP’s Owens Valley pumping stations, drawing the derision of many of the denizens of Inyo County, who didn’t take kindly to the City of Los Angeles plundering their most precious resource in order to quench the thirst of 20-million Angelinos living 275 miles to the southwest. 

As soon as Jessica graduated from Bishop High School, Mary spirited her away to Seattle in search of a better life, which both pursued zestfully; running a vintage clothing store in Fremont by day, while reaching the highest levels of academia taking evening classes at the University of Washington.  Twelve years after moving to Seattle, Drs. Mary and Jessica Sherry, PhD, became tenured professors at U-Dub’s world-famous Department of English Literature.

**

It didn’t take Jess long to get dressed and ready– she always raced to Lennie’s side whenever he beckoned, although she hated herself for it.  So she was surprised when Lennie called again less than 20 minutes later. 

“Where are you?”

“I’m on the West Seattle Bridge”

“Fine.”

“Lennie, have I ever been late?”

“Sorry babe.  There’s a lot riding on all this.”

“I know, Lennie.  I know.”

“See you at the Pass at about 1:30?”

“I’ll be there by Noon, honey.  Have a safe flight.”

“You wanna be talking to Russ about that.”

The skies over the San Juan Islands were as clear as the picture on a high-definition television.  As Tallmadge eased the pastel green Cessna to an altitude low enough to permit a bird’s eye view, Lennie could see a large school of dolphin gracefully arcing over the waves, gulls flying in formation directly above the dolphins, and the ferry boat Yakima, whooshing its way through choppy seas toward Shaw Island.  Snapshots like these reminded Leibowitz why he’d left New Jersey for the Pacific Northwest more than 30 years ago. 

Chapter 10

The Pink Elephant

In the excitement of the moments, smack dab in the middle of the tectonic shift in Lennie’s life, sat a Pink Elephant who never left the room.  Surely Lennie wasn’t the only one who considered the possibility that the old man with the preternatural smile was demented beyond repair, yet another victim to the same relentless disease that had stolen Lennie’s father years before he’d gone to his grave.  

"Jess, you know that song by John Prine, about the old people?"

"Hello in There,” Jessica said.  “I know the stanzas you're thinking about.”

            Ya' know that old trees just grow stronger,
            And old rivers grow wilder ev'ry day.
            Old people just grow lonesome
            Waiting for someone to say, "Hello in there, hello."

            So if you're walking down the street sometime
            And spot some hollow ancient eyes,
            Please don't just pass 'em by and stare
            As if you didn't care, say, "Hello in there, hello."

"Exactly," Lennie said.

           

 Jessica eloquently chased the tears from Lennie’s eyes:

“Honey, his eyes radiate beauty.  His smile doesn’t merely beam; it sings a song that only he knows, but that he desperately needs to share.  He’s more alive than you and me. Lennie, maybe he just needs us to say hello in there.”