PAIN MANAGEMENT: PILLS, PILLOWS, AND PETTY

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Over the years he had grown increasingly impatient with God’s patience. His sense of justice longed to see God’s righteous wrath smite “this world”, this wretched, wicked world.

He knew, of course, that God’s patience was righteousness and that his impatience, being out of alignment with God’s will, was sin. But he was, after all, merely a man, and couldn’t be expected to exercise the same sort of wisdom and patience that his Creator did.

And Joshua adjured them at that time, saying, Cursed be the man before the Lord, that riseth up and buildeth this city Jericho: he shall lay the foundation thereof in his firstborn, and in his youngest son shall he set up the gates of it.
~ Joshua 6:26

His name was Jericho, and he studied the Bible diligently, so he was aware that God had appointed an End-Time, a point at which He would intervene, cast out the devil, his minions and his ways; there would be weeping and gnashing of teeth, and then the God of Love, and Christ, the Lord of Love, would rule a peaceful world. Any time now, Jericho thought. But days became weeks, weeks turned into months, and months and months became years and years. And Jericho grew weary of waiting and began to envy those in his social sphere who passed away into freedom from this world.

When Jericho was young, a teenager, his mother Stevie once told him that at his birth she intuitively sensed that he was a unique soul, a very special someone who had entered the world for a specific purpose, and when he suggested that this was likely something most mothers felt about their firstborn, she insisted that what she had apprehended about him went well beyond a mother’s customary pride and joy.

As he aged, Jericho became more and more convinced that God had blessed him with talent – a capacity for creativity. Wasn’t it true that Jericho rarely encountered other writers whom he felt to be his superior in wordsmithing?

In an attempt to utilize the talent he believed God had gifted him with, he tried his hand first at one thing and then another. He believed he had something to say through the vehicle of artistic expression: painting, acting, sculpting, photography. At one point, he had garnered a few miniscule bit parts in TV shows and sensed that he was beginning to gain a little traction. Certain, now, that he was working on something big.

Then everything seemed to dry up as soon as it had begun; the acting career simply fizzled into nothingness and disappeared. He failed first at one thing and then another.

But hadn’t God blessed him? Surely the Creator had loaned him some talent. How else could he be able to so thoroughly recognize talent in others, to understand it at such a depth and to articulate it in such clear and perceptive ways?

Over time he finally came to realize that his gifts were supernaturally restricted. Perserverance was irrelevant; success was not an option. Would God bestow a gift and then block the world’s view of it? Perhaps God gave it but then permitted the devil to bind it down, the way He had allowed the devil to impact the life of Job. Maybe God-given gifts had been misused in a previous lifetime and the karmic consequence was a gift that couldn’t be recognized or appreciated by the outside world. Regardless of the reason, the outcome was the same: a desire to create, a capacity to create, but a supernatural barrier against worldly artistic success.

He had tried blogging and failed even at that. His posts, they were always too long, too angry, too complex, too serious, too silly, too something. Always too damned something. He couldn’t even give it away! At the age of 54, hope was getting hard to find.

And so he grew tired of seeing praise heaped upon others whom he believed had less talent than he and had less to say with it. Every bimbo in garish makeup with a dance track was a major hit; every Kung Fu-fighting Mastodon was a movie star; every Feminist writer was a millionaire with a fawning fan base.

Most of all, Jericho grew disgusted by the sight of God’s enemies in this world winning! Until even the success of the merely mediocre agnostics began to irritate him.

Jericho had come to feel that dreams were just dreams. He believed that he was internally honest with himself – and there’s no one as honest as those in pain.

But beyond this, my son, be warned: the writing of many books is endless, and excessive devotion to books is wearying to the body.
~ Ecclesiastes 12:12

Jericho knew about the Khmer Rouge. He knew about Operation Northwoods, 9/11 and other American false-flag terrorist events. He knew about the injustice of Family Courts, the Federal Reserve’s illegal and immoral economic prestidigitation, and he just couldn’t live in a world with these things much longer.

He gradually came to suspect that the maxim was true: ignorance is bliss. At the very least, it left a person able to interact with others and not feeling entirely isolated and excommunicated from ordinary society. He came to almost regret all the reading he had done. And what was the point of scholarly study anyway, when every John and Jane Doe felt their opinion was as valid as yours regardless of how many tomes you had consumed on the subject while they were watching 'Buffy The Vampire Slayer', 'American Idol', 'The Simpsons', and 'Lost'?

Unless the Lord builds the house, They labor in vain who build it; Unless the Lord guards the city, The watchman keeps awake in vain.
~ Psalm 127:1

Jericho worked as a night watchman, and night after night, he would look up at God and say he was lonely. Jericho couldn’t relate to "the world today", and he’d often think, This ain't no job for a man like me; I got potential, and my life's worth more than the minimum wage.

Ironically, when he was but a toddler, Jericho’s mother, Stevie, had written an untitled sketch for a short story about a night watchman in a jewelry store. It began with the sentence, “He was a lonely man.” Divorced and dejected, the unnamed main character in Stevie’s story eventually encountered a burglar breaking into the jewelry store, and pulling his gun, he deliberately put the burglar in a position to shoot him. The night watchman died, and “his dying thoughts - not of his past life, his sins and wasted years - only that tomorrow he would be news: his name in the papers at last.”

“He thought differently in his working hours: gave no thought to what might have been, only of how to die. He conjured 100 ways to die...”
~ Stevie Meade; ‘Untitled’

And occasionally Jericho too would fantasize about sacrificing his life in defense of the employees he watched over at night. He simply wanted out. He knew that was a weakness in him, that it was indicative of a weak individual, but he had finally come to accept that about himself: he was an artist who couldn’t prosper, and he was a weak man. ...OK.



Then one June night he peered into a sky where he lost and found himself. It was a sky cluttered with furious clouds; huge, cursing, grey and black clouds that looked like they could begin spitting at a moment’s notice. And between the clouds he saw a shade of blue he’d never viewed before but which he knew; a penetrating blue, one that could be felt. A deep, rich blue that corresponded with the color of his world-weary soul. Jericho had been born with a melancholy mind, but life had caused that blue of mind to darken and then to seep into his soul until it had been unalterably dyed that same hue. Nobody really knew this because he put on quite a front, but at his center – the i of  him – was an unfathomable, aching, electroluminescent blue encased in the pale blue exterior that he allowed the world around him to see.

Everybody’s waiting on something that hasn’t come yet.
~ Tom Petty; ‘You Can Still Change Your Mind’

And when Jericho experienced those palpable blue patches in the night sky and recognized them in himself, he knew he was finished. Finished waiting for God, finished waiting for the revealing of his purpose, finished waiting for Godot, or for Brigitte Bardot. Jericho was done waiting for . . . anything. He had no wife and no children, no one really needed him. And so Jericho made up his mind to break the Sixth Commandment and hope for Divine forgiveness.

He held off until Sunday – the “Lord’s Day” – and then he drove to a grocery store, bought red lipstick and a bottle of red wine; collected the other things he would need, loaded them into his car and then started for Las Vegas. He was working on something big.



Stevie and Jericho’s father, Kenneth, were married at one of those little white chapels on Las Vegas Boulevard, just north of ‘The Strip’. Stevie once told Jericho that she was convinced he had been conceived on the wedding night, at the El Cortez Hotel. She couldn’t prove it, of course, but she said that somehow she just sensed that something was different within her body the following morning.

The idea of concluding everything at the place where it began appealed to Jericho; he thought that was a unique concept. So he drove directly to downtown Las Vegas – it was one hundred and three degrees when he arrived – and checked into the El Cortez Hotel. He told the desk clerk that he was a talent scout for Speedball Records and he was there to see a local band called Tom Trivial And The Dead Ringers. He requested a corner room and paid for a single night’s stay.



The minute he got to the room, Jericho placed the sign around the outside doorknob reading, MAID, Please Have This Room Made Up Soon As Possible. Then he turned on the air-conditioning unit – no reason to die uncomfortably – and went to the bathroom where he wrote on the mirror with the red lipstick, Just couldn't wait around until the last dog was hung. Goodbye, cruel wrold!

Jericho scrawled those two sentences across the mirror, making a conscious effort to overcome his natural tendency to print neatly in block letters. He wanted it to look like it always did in the movies. And he deliberately transposed the letters r and o in the word “world”. It appealed to his unusual sense of humor to know that later, someone somewhere would think: What an idiot! He couldn't even write cliches correctly.

Then Jericho took the lipstick and used it to make a large red dot on the end of his nose, and lines from either end of his mouth, arching upward into an outrageously false smile. Now he looked like a demented circus clown.

Careful to disturb the bedding as little as possible, he eased the pillows out from underneath the sheets and comforter and he stacked them atop each other near the headboard. Pouring himself a glass of wine, Jericho said a prayer to God, thanking Him for the wine and for the sleeping pills and asking His forgiveness for the sin he was about to commit. Then Jericho opened his bottle of 15 milligram Temazepam - prescribed to him by his doctor for sleep-related problems - and he swallowed all 30 capsules with three gulps of Cabernet Sauvignon.

Yeah, Jericho wouldn’t be here when the Trumpet blasted and God finally returned to kick the doors in on His creation, but he hoped that God would give hell to every son-of-a-bitch!

Jericho plugged in his portable compact disc player, put a CD into it, brought up track number four and pressed the “Play” and “Repeat” buttons. The song would play over and over and over until someone in authority finally turned the compact disc player off.

Then he leaned back, resting his head upon that stack of pillows, and closing his eyes, he listened to the introduction of the song – a shimmering, metallic, electric guitar sound.

Then Jericho entertained the thought . . .

Perhaps it wasn't a karmic consequence or a supernatural restriction after all; maybe my ambition far exceeded my talent. ...And then again... maybe I should have tried my hand at music. ...Oh well.

But wild beasts of the desert shall lie there; and their houses shall be full of doleful creatures; and owls shall dwell there, and satyrs shall dance there.
~ Isaiah 13:21

It was 9:12 AM, Monday, when the day maid put her master key into the lock and opened his door. She stepped inside before hearing the music playing. Then she called out, “Hello? Señor? Señorita? Housekeeping!” She walked slowly, cautiously, into the room and then saw the sleeping man, his head on the stacked-up pillows of the still-made bed. What are those strange red markings on his face? “You want I clean the room?” she asked, nervously inching her way forward.

And the song that emanated from the speakers of the portable compact disc player was this:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlQpoJk5ON0

~ Stephen T. McCarthy

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