“me and the father are one” jesus.

  Dad was bronzing himself in the summer sun, sweat dripping down his chest, his hands fidgeting awfully close to his balls. He was in shorts, as always after Memorial Day. He was red as an Indian chief. He smelled like tobacco and canned peas. He was about to say something interesting. I was egging him on to please please gimme some fatherly wisdom before you die, you goddamn man of stone and unconscious delicacy approaching grace.

  I had said, “I dig Jesus, Dad, whattaya think of the guy?”

  He gave a German ACH with spit. “Cmon Jim. Don’t ever tell me you believe in that bullshit.”

  This was a former boyscout, high school principal, Sunday school teacher, a guy who wanted to be 1.a radio announcer or 2.a minister or 3. a teacher.  He chose (3). He taught American history for 25 years until his ambition got the better of him & he went into “administration”. For the money.

  “But dad, He died for your sins, you know,” I said without feeling. I was in shorts too. Dad was pleased beyond measure because finally I had taken my shirt off and exposed my lilywhite mama’s boy skin to the sun.  “take yer shirt off!” he would command. I would always say, “I am too fat dad”. That got an “ach”. I used to sweat in the sun fully dressed in jeans and tee shirt just to pay the old stonehead some attention, where it mattered, in the Sun.

  “Bah. Buncha damn fools. Don’t ever tell me you got hooked up with them, Jim.” Vehement.

Take heed and beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of the Sadducees.

  “Ok, I won’t. Just testing you.” The old man fucked with my head for fun, I thought. Then when I had a good comeback, he would go silent or just say, “mm” or “uh huh” in agreement.  Hardly agreement. It was dismissal. Not this time. I was fully manic and drinking a beer with my old man. It puzzled me why he, as a 100percent German, never drank beer. “Ah, tried it. No good.”

  “Jim, I been through all this. Jesus this, jesus that. Well, I am jesus. Ya know?”

 “not really”

 “ah, people told me that. I dunno”

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  He lit his pipe with precision, left it clamped in his mouth as only he could. “Got enough smokes? You’re not smoking.”

  I  lit up. From the pack he bought me earlier on our biweekly liquor/tobacco run. Wine for him. Sherry. Carter hall tobacco. Camels, filtered for me. I was maybe 20 then. Dad still had all his wits. This was my father with all his faculties. He only spoke to me like this. It was a harbinger of the comic genius he would become in his demented old age, I see now. But this was my father.

“there must be some way outta here/said the joker to the thief/ too much confusion/cant get no relief”.dylan

  “He healed people and rose em from the dead, Dad. Did you do any of that?” I asked, embolded from the smoke.

  “Hah. Can’t remember. I’m an old man now.”

  He spat some tobacco juice out.

  “Dad, come on. You wanted to be a minister, you said. There musta been a reason.”

  Too complicated for him, this question. He only had a master’s degree in education, after all.

Are ye also yet without understanding? Do not ye yet understand, that whatsoever entereth in at the mouth goeth into the belly, and is cast out into the draught?

  “Jim,” he said, in his ponderous predictable best, “ I have never been more than a teacher. I do not pretend to be a philosopher-king.”

  I had no idea what that was, but I know now.

  “What do you worship, dad, for fuck’s sake?” I would try profanity on him and he would either ignore me or tell me what it was in German.

  “I worship the sun. I am an Aztec.”

  Nuff said. For now…. Later, a lot said. A lot.

  I was just 20 though. I’d had a magnificent philosophy professor, German of course, Dad’s age, who had schooled me somewhat but not yet enough. I trusted him more than my own father, because he could speak.

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