Seeing God

Funny how you see God one wonderful night and you figure: Hey, this is it: I’m seeing God now! Well, the best laid wives of mice and men…

I bump into God at a party. She wants to give me a card, but has lost her purse. We spend over an hour turning the house upside down looking for the damn thing. Finally give up. Reunite back around the punch bowl.
God promises to email me one when she gets back home. Forgot her cell. Or palm pilot. Or blackberry. Or whatever ya call such robots these bloody days. Do I have any idea anymore who even runs the government?
I drink to that – lost in her eyes, along with the punch whose ingredients I understand are basically vodka, bhang, poppy pods, kava root, acid for color.
God chuckles. The reflection in her pupils reveals our smiles match. She suggests we drift out onto the lawn, admire the stars.
Out of the kitchen, through the parlor, passing yakking clots of aging revellers. Smokers cheating death out on the verandah. Down half-a-dozen steps onto the path, abandoning the shrinking porchlight.
A mockingbird quibbles with a crescent caught like phlegm in the spruce. Frogs basso-continuo over cricket static. We flop on the mown blades gathering dew.
“Did you notice,” God passes gas, “Algol tonight at minimum?”
Thought it looked darker. Algol the Ghoul, an eclipsing binary, whom superstitious generations placed in the sky where the eye of Medusa belongs. Medusa also a gorgeously pulsing poisonous jellyfish. At the gray star deep in distant eclipse I stare. Ability to talk turned to stone.
The air acquires a reek of rotten leaves and second coming.
When I don’t say anything, God quips, “’S’matter – pussy got your tongue?”
I giggle, letting on how high both I and the moon.
“Knew this cheetah once over in Flatbush. Stack a deck to beat Old Scratch. Wife the most exotically clapped-up cuckquean since Penelope. One time he’s down in Newark with this cooze tells fortunes on the midway…”
“If Jesus!” I blurt, dam burst, speech regained “possessed a navel – did it pick up fuzz?”
“Sure,” on the grass beside me God coos. “And imagine what in the apothecary THAT brings.”
“Holy Omphalos Lint Yo-yo,” I murmur at the beta star in Perseus. “Thousands… tens of thousands of dollies per micro-ounce. Doubtless cures AIDS. Rectifies scrofula. Dissolves all gall stones…”
From a nearby branch a tree frog disagrees profoundly.
God puts in the clutch to our pigeon engine. Shifts the stick. Speculation back into wordlessness cycles. Bodies behind eyes spinning together fall.
For the next what seem hours we swap meteors that do for spit. Insert our comet under the zodiac. Time for the night stands still. Self-contradicts in one soundless tick.
Wake up at sunrise supine on the grass between the spruce and the pine. Heavy with dew, nowhere to go, nothing to do – jobless, homeless, hungover, grasping not at straws, but for a…
God returned home alone, I guess, struggling to my feet. Left not so much as a twitter or a cheep. Say nought of a calling card. But, ah – what a lion, what a cheetah, what PUSSY!
Feeling sinking in – cold sun flooding eyes – blood pressure catching up to stood up – that never again will I ever see God…

I was just a kid of maybe 27 that clairvoyant night I crashed the party with the hot-poop punch. Like any kid, I was then full of shit. But I was right about the feeling: never again have I seen God.
And today I’m married, working a straight job, own my own mortgage; still full of shit, distressingly sober, looking forward to dying godless on the job. Meantime squeezing out the pimples of maybe a few more parables.
Work is the new retirement. Stay tuned.

Willie Smith