Tuesday, May 13, 2008
He'd had the feeling since he was in college. One sultry Saturday in early September, he was invited to a party, one advertised as a rager, a 20-kegger, a blowout. When he arrived, though, there was no beer at all, not a drop to drink. The party sucked and everyone was bummed. It was hot, oppressively humid, and the revelers were so thirsty they were actually drinking water.
Junior said enough. Junior took a stand. He jumped in his pickup and returned 12 minutes later with a flatbed full of Miller in bright silver barrels -- even bringing along five taps to get things going speedily. He was received like a hero, and that night had intercourse with two different women, and also got a very pleasant reach-around from his faculty advisor, Michael.
Somewhere amid the festivities, his drunken friend Karl threw his arm around Junior and told him that he was the savior.
"You saved this party, man," Karl said. "Like in the Bible, with the wine and Jesus and shit." Karl then ran into the street and was hit by a small child riding an ATV.
Until then, Junior had only heard general information about the Bible and Jesus, but that night, just before following Michael to the roof, he vowed to take a look at the Bible. And true to his word, just seven months later, he stole one from the dorm library and finished reading it, or a lot of it, over the next three or four years.
And it spoke to him. It immediately became one of his favorite books. He wanted to know more about it. He began to read the lifestyle magazines and even the Paris Review, hoping one day they would interview its author.
In the meantime, every time he read about the deeds of Jesus, he felt as if the author of the book was talking about him -- J. Junior Inferior Jr.! This was not the first time this had happened. A few years earlier, he had the same feeling when he read his other favorite book, a biography of Don Drysdale called "Don Drysdale, On Top of the World." He was so enthralled by the heroics of Drysdale, star pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers, that he began to imagine that he was Don Drysdale! The words were so vivid! The actions so likely to have been performed by him, J. Junior!
He became so confused that one day he devised a test, to determine once and for all whether or not he was in fact Don Drysdale, subject of "Don Drysdale, On Top of the World."
One day, he put the book on the kitchen table, where he could see it from the backyard. Then he ran around outside, jumped up and down, climbed a tree and hit his cat with a shovel. When he came back inside, he checked all the pages of the book. But nowhere was there anything about Don Drysdale running, jumping and hitting a cat with a shovel. He checked twice, and that was that. Mystery solved. He was not Don Drysdale.
But with the Bible and Jesus, it was different. There seemed to be so many similarities between him and Jesus. Both of them were white and were men, for starters. There were many other things, too.
So over the years, as he came to know the Word of the Lord more personally and tried to read even the less interesting parts of the Bible, he always kept his secret to himself. He told no one that he would not be surprised if one day it was discovered that Jesus Christ had returned to earth and was actually him, J.J.I. Jr. Everyone else would be surprised, but Junior would just shrug and say, sheepishly, "Well, I had a feeling this would happen!"
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