The Lost Episodes of Revie Bryson

By Bryan Furuness

Revie becomes convinced he is the second coming of Christ. But when his mother runs away to Hollywood, Revie's faith is shaken.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Black Lawrence Press
• Release date: Feb 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9781937854317

Book preview

Section 1

Crucifixion

Chapter 1

The year I turned twelve, I believed I was the second coming of Christ. I have a good guess about how I came up with this idea, but it’s harder to say what sustained the belief beyond an initial What if? Nothing about me suggested divinity. Apart from my overdeveloped imagination, I was a pretty normal kid: skinny, buzz cut, prone to daydreams, but still a B student because my teachers preferred my occasional catatonia to the spastic violence (bloody knuckles, wet willies) displayed by my classmates.

The fact that I had lived for eleven years without so much as a hint of holiness did not dissuade me. After all, the first Jesus didn’t find out his true identity until he was twelve.

According to my mother, anyway, who made up Bible stories.

Actually, she claimed that her stories were chapters of the original Bible that hadn’t made the final cut, but even I could tell she’d made them up. Her lost episodes were mostly about the boyhood of Jesus, but they featured cars, steel mills, and transistor radios among other artifacts not generally associated with life at the outset of Anno Domini. Her Jesus watched Cheers while halfheartedly strumming his electric guitar. I might not have grown up in the church, but even I knew that Christ did not come of age in the mid-eighties in Paris, Indiana.

Still, her lost episodes were not easily dismissed. My mother’s imagination was a swirling galaxy, and her stories were spirits moving over the face of the deep, calling forms out of the void. Wild as prophecy and seemingly just as coded, her stories told a truth deeper than reality.

She never actually told me I was the second coming—not in so many words—but nevertheless, this was the message I took from her stories. Her Jesus felt as real and recognizable as a lost twin. It never occurred to me that she might have modeled Jesus on me. I was certain I’d been modeled on him.

Summer evenings, while my mother watched videos and my father gave private golf lessons, I sat in my darkening bedroom and listened for the voice of God in the distant wail of trains. Headlights from passing cars streaked across my bedroom wall like comets, those old harbingers of fate. Laying my hand on an alphabet puzzle, I waited for Holyghost to guide me, like Ouija.

Whenever I considered my destiny as the second coming, my scalp prickled wildly. In fact, my whole body felt charged with electricity, individual hairs rising like antennae to receive the signal. In those moments that I understood as a foretaste of my divine power, I would be tempted to try out a miracle—just a small one, like turning bath water to cherry Kool-Aid—but I held back because I knew this tingling wasn’t the real thing. Not yet. These little bursts of ecstasy were sent to gauge my readiness, like tests of the emergency broadcast system.

The feeling could come over me anytime: while I was tying action figures to bottle rockets before sending them to their glorious, fiery demise. I am the Lord; feel my wrath. Or caddying for my father. I walked among you, and yea, you knew me not. Or when my mother was telling me about the Adventures of Holyghost, a name she pronounced as one word, like Superman. Anoint me, Holyghost.

Did my mother know the effect her stories had on me? She’d grown up reading palms at county fairs and flea markets; she knew the human condition inclines toward faith. You don’t have to make people believe, she’d told me more than once. You just have to let them.

The old part of Paris, where we lived, was a spread of sooty ranches for teachers and mill workers, though there were fewer of the latter every year. Each layoff at the mills in nearby Gary was said to be the last one—now they were efficient, now they could compete with that cheap Japanese shit—until the next last layoff a few months later.

But even as blight ate through Gary, new subdivisions sprang up around the larger Calumet Region featuring houses with three-car garages and in-ground swimming pools. Low taxes and depressed real estate values made the Region an idyllic bedroom community for Chicago, or so the new billboards claimed. A lot of regionnaires resented the growing population of FIPs (fucking Illinois people), but FIPs were good for my father’s business, what with laid-off mill workers not exactly chasing him down for a private lesson to straighten out their slices.

But every real estate boom, no matter how successful, has its washouts. A few blocks south of my house was an aborted development that everyone called Napalm Alley, because it looked like scorched earth. The developer had barely managed to clearcut the parcel and pave a few roads before all his heavy equipment got repo’d.

Most adults called the site an eyesore, but for my friends and me, it was a soundstage for the movie that was our lives. The beauty of Napalm Alley was its blankness. Terra rasa. It could become anything. On the empty roads, my friend Woz and I mounted bicycles and jousted with giant Tinkertoy lances. We conducted experiments, such as belching into an empty tennis can, then sealing it up quick and tossing it in a shallow hole. Ten years from now, said Woz, we can dig it up and smell that very burp.

And Napalm Alley, with its paved roads and relative lack of obstacles, was the perfect location for my mother to teach me how to drive.

Apparently, giving your keys to an eleven-year-old was not unusual where she grew up, south of Paris in the ocean of corn that seemed to make up the rest of Indiana. All the farm kids drove, she told me at the start of my first lesson. Now give her a little gas.

I was not a farm kid. My only driving experience had been the bumper cars at Kiddieland, where I routinely got my car stuck in a corner for other children to ram with glee. Now I was behind the wheel of a two-ton station wagon. I was a little nervous.

This is okay with Dad, right? I said.

My mother snorted like I’d made a joke. Which meant he wasn’t going to ask, and she wasn’t going to volunteer anything.

My father enjoyed having a family, I’m pretty sure, but he didn’t want to get bogged down in the day-to-day details. For her part, my mother cooperated by giving him only the broadest description of our home life. She might tell him, for instance, that we’d watched a movie that morning. Did he need to know that it was a home movie, one that we’d been shooting over the past month with her 8mm camera? Did he need to know that she played Nell Fenwick, while I played both Dudley Do-Right and Snidely Whiplash? Or that, earlier that week, the neighbor’s Weimaraner had gotten so excited by my mock-assault that it jumped the fence to attack my mother’s petticoats, and I ran inside the house as my mother got dragged across the backyard, all the while keeping her hand pressed to her forehead, mouthing in an exaggerated fashion, Where, oh where, is my Dudley?, even as her fellow actor was standing at the kitchen window, cracking his knuckles in terror and shame, more Snidely than Dudley, until at last the dog gave up and slunk away, looking embarrassed and confused?

No. That was more than my father could bear to know. We kept him from the knowledge as much as we kept it from him.

In the car, my mother reminded me that excess caution hurts as many people as recklessness. Hit the gas, she said. It’s not like this heap is going to accelerate out of control.

I fed the car a little gas. Very little. The needle nudged up to twenty. That was school-zone speed, right? Surely the police wouldn’t allow you to go a killing speed around little kids. The needle still pointed at twenty when I initiated my first left turn.

The tires squealed. Panicking, I clung to the wheel of the station wagon like I was piloting a ship through a gale.

Easy there, McQueen, said my mother. Her voice was so calm that it seemed to belong to a different situation, one that didn’t involve our back tires painting an arc across the asphalt.

After the wagon came to a rocking halt, we got out and looked at the skid mark. My right heel bounced like the needle on a sewing machine. We almost died, I thought. I almost just killed us.

Not that my mother appreciated how close to laming death we’d come. That’s called a fishhook, she said, in the same way that someone else might say, Oh, look. A woodpecker.

A week or so before my twelfth birthday, I walked to the Lutheran church across the highway to see if I could get better reception on my prayers. The front doors were unlocked and the sanctuary was empty, but I thought I might get in trouble for walking into a church uninvited, so I hid by lying down flat on a pew.

We weren’t churchgoers. Sunday mornings were a busy time for my father at the Broadmoor Country Club, and my mother took pride in never having set an alarm clock since dropping out of tenth grade. But even if she had been an early riser, it’s hard to imagine my mother, as she was then, mouthing a creed along with the rest of the congregation, or sitting quietly while some guy told her what to think about God.

What little religious education I had was cobbled together from my mother’s stories and a children’s Bible from the bookshelf downstairs. What made it a Bible for children? Large type and grisly illustrations. The Old Testament was a real bloodbath, apparently, but what really caught my attention were the drawings of the Passion, from the whip dancing across Christ’s back to the puckering spear wound in His side.

Good thing I wasn’t the first Jesus, I’d think whenever I looked at the crucifixion scenes. Good thing the second coming looked like a whole different ball game. The illustrations in the Book of Revelation featured dragons! Buff angels with flaming swords! Some really sexy lady! And in the middle of all the action was New Jesus, broad-shouldered and fierce atop a white steed, wearing what appeared to be gold-plated cowboy boots: now that was a kick-ass vision of divinity a boy could get behind.

I didn’t notice the contradictions between Revelation’s vengeful scenes and the message of the Gospels. Or the notion that all this power was attached to the end of the world. I had tunnel-vision for glory.

The exposed beams of the church were washed with watery tones of violet and gold from the stained glass windows, like faint beams from a distant and broken movie projector. Pick me, I whispered to God, and listened for my answer.

Someone in here?

My feet jerked out, kicking a stack of hymnals to the floor. A man walked up the aisle with his hands out as if to say I come in peace. His sandals made big smacking sounds against his soles. I’m the pastor, he said. Pastor Mike.

Nothing, I said, though he hadn’t asked me what I was doing.

Pastor Mike looked about my father’s age, but his curly black hair was shot through with gray. A little paunch folded over the top of his tight, beltless jeans. You’re welcome here, you know, he said, but he also eyed the mud crumbles my shoes had left on the pew, so I brushed off the nubbly fabric before re-stacking the hymnals.

He asked a few questions—Could he sit? Did I live around here? Was this my first time in the church?—but my answers were short and soon he ran out of prompts. We ended up sitting quietly in the pew. I didn’t mind this; it reminded me of being around my father. The silence seemed to make Pastor Mike nervous, though. He kept checking his hands, and saying Ah or Um before falling silent again. At last, when it seemed like he was about to make an excuse to slip away, I brought up The Subject. So I hear Jesus is coming again.

He laughed. So I hear.

I paused—was he making fun of me?—but decided to go on. If he kept laughing, I could always run out, leaving fresh mud crumbles all over his stupid church. So it has to be someone, right?

Jesus? He looked a little surprised. When he spoke again, it was in the guarded tone he’d used coming up the aisle. I suppose, sure.

My mouth went dry. I looked at the empty cross as if it held a flashing VACANT sign. What if it’s me?

Pastor Mike didn’t answer right away. Outside, on the highway, cars swept past in traffic-light cycles, the surf of the suburbs.

When I was a boy, he said, I thought I might be a prophet. This was right after I’d read the Samuel story—you know, the one where the Lord calls to him in the night?

I had no idea what he was talking about, but I nodded anyway. That story must not have made the final cut of my children’s Bible.

I stayed up nights, he said. Must have been for a week, listening for my name to be called. Once, I even thought I heard it. He smiled at the memory, then shook his head. But it was probably sleep deprivation. Or wanting something enough to fool myself.

I shook my head at the empty cross. You said Jesus had to be someone.

I’m not saying it’s not you. I’m just saying… either way it goes, you should know you’re not alone.

That wasn’t what I wanted to hear. I wasn’t looking for a band of like-minded idiots; what I wanted was to be exceptional, all-powerful, The One.

When he said, You are not alone, I heard: You ain’t so special.

Chapter 2

When my father met my mother, he was a twenty-two-year-old country club pro with a swing as strong and beautiful as the high note in the National Anthem. She was a palm reader at the Broadmoor’s annual Arabian Nights Bazaar. According to my father, my mother had an unusual style. She tended to linger with her customers instead of booting them out of her tent after a couple of broad predictions, which, along with her attractiveness, led to a long line composed mostly of men. And her revelations were surprisingly specific, sometimes about herself, and occasionally true. That first night, for instance, she told my father a number of things, including that she was eighteen (a lie: she had just turned sixteen) and that he had high blood pressure (true: a doctor confirmed it a few days later).

The next week, when he found out that she was a counselor with the Broadmoor summer day camp, he sought her out with the excuse of telling her she’d been right about the hypertension. It seemed to flare up, he noticed, when he was around her—his heart going like a piston, his hands swelling, a flush crawling up his neck—which he turned into a running joke: Read my palm, tell me if I’m having The Big One. Is a quadruple bypass in my future?

In those early days, they liked to talk about the future. My father was saving up to go to California, where he was hoping to play his way onto the pro circuit. That’s where my mother wanted to go, too. It was her Mecca, the birthplace of the movies she loved. Early on, California was what they had in common. A few months later, I was what they had in common and California was out of the picture.

Things must have looked pretty bleak. Forget losing their dreams—how were they going to make a living? A golf pro didn’t make enough money to support a family, especially during the cold months, and a pregnant palm reader would earn even less. That’s when my father, who was not known for inventiveness, hit upon the biggest idea of his life: the golfdome.

The business equation was sound: put up a giant inflatable dome, and when inclement weather came, so would the golfers. And it worked. The winter after the dome was built, memberships shot up, private lessons followed, and my father was transfigured into an earner, a dependable and steadfast provider.

I’ve heard the dome was something of a marvel when it was first inflated—a dewy white bubble struggling awkwardly from the ground like a boxer fighting a ten-count—but on the afternoon just before my birthday when I biked through the rain to see my father, the dome was paunchy, its skin the dingy shade of roadside snow. The inside was totally derelict. Steel beams were lined with dust as thick as felt, the air had a fungal smell like an old tent, and holes pocked the net that divided the dome down the middle.

When I arrived, my father broke away from his lesson with a little boy in a sweater vest and trotted over to me. He pointed at my wet clothes. You biked down here in the rain?

It was a warm rain.

You ask your mom to drive you?

It was like a shower. Want to have lunch?

He looked at the roof of the dome. Behind him, the kid in the sweater vest stabbed his golf bag with his pitching wedge—Die, die, die, he was chanting—but my father was too busy doing mental equations to notice. Most people think a golf pro leads a life of leisure, but the truth was that my father worked like a dog. Freeing up even a half hour in the middle of the day was tough. But who can say no to a wet child?

Give me twenty minutes to finish up here, all right? He tossed me his keys. I’ve got a spare change of clothes in my locker. Meet me in the dining room.

All my early ideas about wealth were formed by the locker room of the Broadmoor. The green carpet so thick it ate sound, mahogany benches and lockers that shone darkly, a clock with Roman numerals, blue toilet water—it all seemed like the trappings of a life of trust funds and charity balls. Coming into the empty locker room on a rainy day, it was easy to imagine it as my private dressing room with a gold star on the door.

I took my time getting ready for lunch, first showering, then sampling the complimentary line of grooming products arranged by the long mirror. I gargled my way through half a bottle of mouthwash and shaved with a yellow safety razor, though I had nothing but downy fuzz on my cheeks. Thinking of my father waiting on me made me feel important.

Not that he actually waited. I arrived in the dining room to find him halfway through a Salisbury steak. He pointed his fork at a plate of cold chicken fingers. I took the liberty of ordering for you.

From the kid’s menu, evidently. Which explicitly said Li’l Duffers: for children ten years old and under ONLY. And in case the patron couldn’t read so well, there was a picture of a dorky cherub obviously ripped off from the Love Is… comic strip. The fact that I actually liked chicken fingers and could eat them all day long was beside the point. The point was that his order painted us both in an unflattering light: him as a tightass, and me as a little kid.

Geez, he said through a mouthful of meat. Those clothes actually it you. You’re getting huge. Do you tower over your classmates, or what?

I didn’t, in fact. According to the charts in the school nurse’s office, I was only slightly taller than average. My father and I were the same height, though he had a few pounds on me, thanks to the doughy roll around his beltline. If he had shaved off his brush mustache and cut out the sweets that were his weakness, he might have passed for my brother. Still, I was pleased enough by his remark that I didn’t complain about the chicken fingers. Besides, I had come to discuss a bigger piece of business. About my birthday, I began.

He stopped sawing at his steak. What do you want?

You don’t have to buy me anything.

What? No presents?

Presents are kind of a little kid thing, aren’t they? I mean, you and Mom don’t give each other presents for your birthdays, right?

I didn’t mention that I had no need for presents because soon I would be able to manifest whatever I wanted with a snap of my fingers. Or maybe a quick thrust of my hips. I wasn’t sure; I was still working on my signature