An Easter Tale

 

(God bless all the fuckheads and retards!)

When I was fifteen years old, I lived in rural Connecticut. The town was almost postcard quality. I shit you not. We had freshly painted protestant churches which dated back to the 18^th century, and ancient spooky graveyards with the remains of veterans from both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars planted in the earth. Furthermore, all the houses of worship possessed old-fashioned steeples that came with gigantic bells. These bells would ring during important holidays like Christmas and New Year. My hamlet also boasted a well-manicured park which featured a gazebo where bands would sometimes play on the weekends. It was a nice place.

Then in early Autumn, a no-account black man decided to make the gazebo his permanent home. He moved in with two Caucasian women. They were all wearing sheets which had been stitched to resemble crude dresses. I guess you could call their garments half-assed togas. It was fucking weird. To make matters even more screwed up, this no-account black guy started telling everyone that he was Jesus.

I raced in the direction of my house to share the news with my father. But he was out drinking with his buddies. Dad rarely came home early in the evenings. He enjoyed socializing. Yet I did manage to catch him the next morning before he departed for work. He was hungover, and I could hear him puking into the toilet.

I knocked on the door with my knuckles. “Dad!”

He said, “What do you want?”

“There’s a no-account black man living in the gazebo downtown.”

“That’s old news. My friends told me about it last night.”

“He’s got two white women with him.”

“I know. They told me that, too.”

I went downstairs. My mom was wearing her perpetual frown. She had been married to a raging alcoholic for many years, and it was starting to smash her psyche to pieces. I would often hear her crying in the bedroom. She wasn’t exactly a silent sobber.

I said, “Have you heard about the no-account black guy living in the gazebo?”

She nodded. “Yes. You told me yesterday.”

“He’s got two white women with him.”

“Yes. You told me that, too.”

“They’re going to freeze to death come wintertime.”

“Serves them right. That’s what happens to people who refuse to work.” She paused for dramatic effect. “Did you know that Henry the Eighth executed 78,000 unemployed men? In King Henry’s day, they were called sturdy beggars. And being a useless bum was a crime worthy of death.”

“Well, I’m reading a book called Walden Pond. It’s about a guy who spends all his time hanging out in the woods. I don’t think that he worked a day in his life, but we’re reading his stuff in English class. His name was Henry David Thoreau.”

She sighed heavily. “He sounds like a useless homosexual.”

Later that morning, I walked to school and talked with my classmates. One of my best friends was the son of a local police officer. He told me that his father had went to the gazebo the previous evening to make sure that everybody was all right and to drop off some blankets. But what he had seen was out of this world. One of the white women had been giving the no-account black man a blowjob right out in the open.

Needless to say, the three of them were eventually run out of town. Public orgies in rural Connecticut were frowned upon. At least back then. But I wrote a short story regarding the incident when I was a freshman in university. I made it a religious tale, and the no-account black man was the hero. The racist town folk hated him, so they stuck the poor guy with a shank and he bled to death under his blanket. The teacher gave me an A.