hey guys,
so me and jay (krantz, creator of bet raise fold and the micros) collaborated to create this short story (based largely off of my stand up material).
we know there are a bunch of writers and lovers of literature here in the lounge so we figured we'd post it here for your enjoyment and hopefully some feedback.
we had a blast writing this together and hope you guys enjoy it.
cheers.
edit: calvin sanjo is a pseudonym obv. we both love calvin n hobbes and sanjo is just made up from the letters of our first name (jason n jonas).
Damned Salvation
By Calvin Sanjo
I’m seated behind the barista counter, reading George Orwell’s 1984 for the fifth time, when Reverend Louis ****ing McDonald starts choking on his blueberry scone. I’d been wondering whether today would be a two-blueberry scone day or a threefer. When the Reverend buys three he pretends number two and three are for his kids but we all know Fatty’s not making it back home with anything but crumbs.
The teenage girl covertly Instagramming his Holiness (he’s a famous figure in Lenton, so catching him outside the church equals at least ten, maybe twenty likes) starts shrieking for help, a full body banshee wail.
The Reverend’s turning white as an eight ball, so I lower my book and lift an eyebrow in the girl’s direction, then vomit in my mouth a little once I realize the screams echoing off her uvula are meant for me.
“Help him,” she cries through lip-glossed lips.
Why don’t you help him? Her plea gets right at the guts of what I hate about this town. Nobody leaves you alone to read unless you’re reading the Bible, and even then you’ll draw a crowd aching to talk to you about it. It’s nothing personal towards Reverend MacDonald. Don’t get me wrong, I do loathe his existence… but I don’t want him to die or anything.
This isn’t exactly an ideal Thursday afternoon for a devout worshipper of Satan.
I’ve lived in Lenton, population 1000, for my entire thirty years on this godforsaken Earth. Our high school’s mascot is Saint Peter. I’m not ****ting you – our football team is the Lenton Saint Peters. I blossomed into the man I am today inside Lenton’s public school system, a sewer if there ever was one.
It’s not like I always prayed at the altar of Beelzebub. I started nursing a healthy skepticism about religion at an early age and graduated into a full-blown cynic in middle school. For most of my years on this goddamned rock I was pretty apathetic, but after I got to 25 and realized I had passed the point where I was ever going to make something of this life, making the leap to Devil worship was easy, an obvious ‘aha’ moment.
I just considered the collection of nutjobs I’d been spending my life actively avoiding. Did I really want to spend eternity in Heaven with all of these *******s?
****, even if we ignore the fact that the vast majority of human suffering and oppression has been carried out in God’s name he still doesn’t sound like the kind of guy you want to waste your afterlife with. He turned entire cities into stone on a whim, wiped out humanity with a flood, created Hitler and Stalin and Disney and AIDS babies and won’t let you eat bacon. He’s either insanely incompetent or just a huge troll. Add that to the fact that almost every super religious person in my life has been zero fun to hang out with (and that’s including Reverend McDonald) and the prospect of spending eternity with these bible thumpers sounds like a fate worse than death.
Ah, hell. I can’t watch a man die. I vault over the barista counter.
Everything that happens next is a holy blur. The Reverend’s too wide for the Heimlich so I move to stomach thrusts with cupped hands. I thump his mountainous belly like I’m plunging the bathroom toilet. His eyes bug out of his head and he hocks up blueberry scone all over the girl. She screams like an altar boy in a priest’s confessional as he heaves himself upwards.
What he says next puts a chill down my spine that’s so cold it straightens my curly-whirly mustache.
“My savior! You… you sir, are a saint!”
A saint? Let’s not get carried away here.
The Reverend hobbles to his feet and wipes gooey pastry off his pinstriped trousers. He searches his pockets deep, withdraws a tiny red Bible, and looks up at the Lord. Then he gazes upon me with what I can only describe as ‘religious intent,’ like he’s staring at big JC himself. He taps the good book and shakes.
“My entire life in Lenton, never have I witnessed a more altruistic act. Because of you, my daughters will see me tuck them into bed tonight.”
Then Reverend McDonald wraps me in a monstrous bear hug and whispers something terrifying into my right ear.
“You are one lucky man. Today, you ensured your spot in Heaven.”
As he walks out the door smiling, he turns to regard me one last time.
“I never caught your name, young man.”
“Sam,” I say, completely shaken.
“Saint Samuel!”
He vanishes into the sunlight. Guaranteed a spot in Heaven? I am very, very afraid.
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I can’t sit still for the remainder of my shift. I stagger out the door. I need to get home, get high, get drunk, squash some goombas in Super Mario Bros. Anything. Guaranteed spot in Heaven? Are you kidding me? Nothing could be worse. Visions of all the horrible heathens I’d spend eternity with swirl around my head like vultures: George Bush, Sarah Palin, Fabio. Gandhi surely knew better, right? Gandhi was too smart to get himself sent to Heaven, yeah?
I am standing at a true crossroads. My hands quiver and sweat as I unlock my bicycle from the rack. The air smells rank, like bad hummus. I start to tear up.
Pull yourself together, Sam!
I can’t mind my own business any longer. I look up at the sky and peer through the cirrus clouds, right into the keyhole carved inside the golden lock set into the front of the pearly gates, and I spit. I spit on the ground. How unlucky can one guy get? If only that girl had stepped in and performed CPR instead of me. If only I didn’t cover for Mauricio so he could go to Vegas for the week. If only the Reverend got broadsided by a minivan during his morning commute. I know in this moment that I have an obligation to my future self, to void my “get-into-Heaven-free” card and hurl myself back into Hades’ clutches where I belong, where I deserve to be. I’ve been a coach-potato Satanist, believing and reading and even praying. But I haven’t upheld my end of the bargain.
My course of action is clear as day: I’ll have to commit a bad deed to rebalance the scales. Time to Darth Vader this town.
I hop on my wheels and cruise through the suburban side streets. I’m pedaling so hard it’s like Cerberus himself is tearing up the hot cement. I knock over trash cans and mailboxes. I steal a light-up Santa ornament left over from Christmas and break it over my knees. Then, when I’m passing the cement shopping center around the corner from my house, divine inspiration strikes. I’ll top off all the carnage with the great American pastime, that favored activity of our nation’s most heinous miscreants: knocking over a liquor store.
I swerve into the liquor store parking lot and stash my bike in the bushes. I rush inside Mr. Patel’s Stop-N-Shop, eyes wild. The doorbell jingles.
Nobody is behind the desk. This is odd. I check my phone and it’s 3PM. Some kind of religious siesta? I’m just starting to get a whiff of “something’s up” when I hear a muffled noise coming from the back of the store. I pocket a Reese’s peanut butter cup and a bag of pretzels for later and investigate.
As I round the corner into the beer aisle, I freeze. There before me are three bonafide desperadoes: a wiry, long-haired one holding a sawed-off shotgun to the head of David, Mr. Patel’s stockboy, and two chubby skinheads who look like they could eat a case of ramen between them, beating the snot out of Mr. Patel.
Somebody else had the same bright idea of knocking over a liquor store today. They’re all looking my way.
“What are you idiots looking at? Keep beating the derka derka.” The dude holding the sawed-off says this to the skinheads, who are exchanging fist bumps with each other and a seriously injured Mr. Patel’s face. He points the shotgun at me. I put my hands in the air.
“You got bad timing, guy.” He jacks the slide.
You have no ****ing idea.
David places his hands together and starts praying to god. This lights a fuse inside my stomach. It’s like a killer bee has stung my esophagus. I cannot control my righteous anger. The ruby red flames searing Satan’s pitchfork erupt to possess my appendages. I become Jackie Chan.
Now I’ve never taken martial arts classes and I don’t have any combat training, but I have seen every single one of Jackie Chan’s kung fu movies and at this moment, Jackie’s spirit karate kicks me into action. First I charge the dude with the sawed-off. He’s so surprised by the swiftness of my tiger leap that I’m able to yank the shotgun clean from his hand. In a motion so smooth it would make Jackie stand up and cheer, I drive the butt of it into the base of the desperado’s nose, shattering his cartilage. A geyser of blood sprays the stockboy in the face. I level the shotgun at him.
“Stop praying. Stop it right ****ing now,” I say.
The chubby skinheads notice their kingpin is down, and turn their attention to me. Only now do I realize I’m in some serious ****: they’re six foot seven goliaths, all leather vests and Grandma tattoos and menacing silver switchblades. No way in hell am I letting these bastards carve me up and send me to Heaven before I put the scales right. I fire a shot into the ceiling. The plaster rains and there’s an odd sound, a creaking, cracking noise not unlike the crunch of a Twix bar, only if the Twix bar weighed two tons.
What I don’t know, but Mr. Patel does – and I know he knows this because he dives for cover like a pelican dives for fish – is that the room above the liquor store is the storage room for Whatabros Furniture Warehouse, and Whatabros is currently storing a set of enormous, extremely heavy black leather couches.
Everyone stands there in awe, watching as a black leather coach tumbles through the ceiling and miraculously pins the two skinheads to the floor beside their boss. Flattened, they’re a trio of ugly, unconscious, a-holes.
David runs to the phone and dials 911. Mr. Patel crawls out from beneath several dozen boxes of Doritos. He walks towards me with outstretched arms, and for the second time today I am enveloped in a great bear hug.
“God bless you! God bless you, my friend! Those men were going to murder us!”
“Don’t exaggerate, Mr. Patel. They were just looking for cash.”
“No, no! They are wanted in six counties for a string of liquor store robberies. They always murdered the owners! And you sir, you saved us.”
I stare at him blankly, incredulous. Dazed and confused.
“God bless you. You were sent from the Lord himself.”
I hand him the shotgun. ****ing hell. I bike home, eating my bag of stolen pretzels with one hand while I ride.
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Three days later, coinciding with Sunday church services, the Mayor holds a ceremony to present me the key to the city. He delivers a personal letter thanking me for my service to the Reverend, Mr. Patel, and to the Lenton community.
The entire town buzzes like bees sucking on a new strain of nectar. They clamor for their chance to see me, the Reverend’s anointed: Saint Samuel. The children prance and sing their songs like little angels. The shopkeeps close down their stores, their wives put on their Sunday best, gossip floats on the crisp winds of Shalbot Boulevard. My mother even flies in from New York – the Reverend invites her personally – to witness my salvation with her own two eyes.
As I look in the mirror, I wonder if it’s too late to head to Vegas in time to blow the rest of my money on roulette and hookers. Or just blow my brains out. But I don’t have enough gas to drive there, enough money for a plane ticket, or enough courage to off myself. So I straighten my tan blazer and summon what courage I do have for what I’m about to do.
The entire walk to church, it is like I am Lady Gaga. I’m hounded for autographs. People gawk and Instagram and call their mothers to brag that they’ve seen me. A group of teenage girls slap me right on the ass, giggling that they’ll never wash their hands again. A bunch of turkey-legged women hold signs that read “God chose YOU, Sam!” and “One God” foam fingers are sold on the street, nestled between swirls of cotton candy and bottles of red wine. A crowd slowly but surely becomes a mass, street by street by street. Their chants of “Samuel the Saint,” soft at first, grow to deafening proportions. We all round the corner together, a teeming Sunday mass.
I straighten my tie as I approach the mega church. God’s mansion, his ark, a carefully constructed wood façade designed by the best artisans and architects money could buy. The same ones who built the Reverend’s oversized house and new Cadillac, no doubt. Glorious wood carved from the Tree of Life itself, flanked by three giant windows reflecting the holy trinity of money, power, and god. Three magnificent crosses jut out of the tops of the buildings like lollipops, like scarecrows. I finger the remote in my pocket.
The crowd gathers around the church. Reverend McDonald and the Mayor have erected a stage out in front for the presentation. They’re beaming at me, the pride of Lenton, as they meet beneath a baby blue banner that reads “GOD BLESS SAMUEL.” The Reverend and the Mayor are bickering over who gets to present the key to the city to me – an actual key: gold, bejeweled, regal – while masking their disagreement underneath warm, welcoming smiles.
I ascend the stage. The crowd is screaming so hard it is like Kurt Cobain has returned from the dead and reunited Nirvana. Mr. Patel and the stockboy are present. The young girl from the coffee shop, who’s freaking out and waving and telling her friends she was there back when it all began. I notice the cops who arrested the liquor store robbers. Even Mauricio is here, returned from Las Vegas with a fake gold tooth and a busty blonde friend in tow. Everyone looks at me expectantly. The Mayor hands me the microphone. The Reverend pats me on the back. “It’s OK son, this is your family, speak to them from your heart.”
I take a deep breath, having spent three days preparing for this moment. I look out at the God fearing folk before me. I spot my mother in the crowd and wink. An “oh, ****” look flashes across her face in realization. Welcome home, Mom.
I extend my middle finger to the Heavens and yell “**** the Lord!”
Everyone is stunned. There is a hush, a murmur, a deafening silence. Even the birds feel awkward. I take the key from the Reverend and mime sucking on it like an enormous golden phallus. The crowd gasps. I chuck the key into the audience and address them.
“I am a Devil worshipper,” I begin. “And there’s nothing wrong with that. You see, you all are judgmental people. I’ve lived here my whole life, and I just can’t stand it any longer. Where do you get off telling me that I’m a saint? What if I don’t want to go to Heaven and spend eternity with all of you? And what’s so bad about the Devil anyway?”
The crowd’s getting riled up.
“What’s the Devil ever done besides offer a chick an organic apple? Fruit is good for you. Think of all the wars that have been fought in God’s name. Crusades, inquisitions, 9/11. No one blows themself up in the name of Lucifer. Followers of the Antichrist are much more respectful of personal boundaries. You never get woken up at 9am on a Saturday by a bunch of Devil worshippers “wanting to talk to you about the devil.” And when’s the last time someone got on TV ranting about how you can’t do this or that, and gay people can’t get married because the Devil says so.”
“This guy’s a ****!” somebody shouts. Everybody laughs.
“As a general rule we mind our own business. And I know you don’t agree with that strategy, but me, I think that’s a pretty smart way to live your life in a world where everybody’s different. The Devil? He doesn’t give a ****. He lets us do what we want because that’s OK. That’s free will. How do we even know the Devil is all that bad of a guy? All the negative descriptions of him were written by hardcore religious nuts, not exactly an unbiased source of information. You don’t go to Fox News when you want an objective person on Obama.”
“Obama’s a terrorist!” one chick shouts. The boos are gathering like ghosts to a grave.
“Are you really going to read the Bible to get a good idea for what Mephistopheles is like? The Devil never causes any famines, or plagues, or murdered every baby boy in Egypt. The Devil doesn’t demand you never take his name in vain when you stub your toe, he isn’t so arrogant as to force you to worship only him and sing songs about him and not watch the early football games so you can sit in church bored out of your mind. My basic point is: I don’t want to spend eternity with people I wouldn’t want to spend the week with, and my whole life I’ve had to spend every week with you people. You people disgust me.”
The boos are now deafening, overwhelming. It takes every ounce of gas I’ve got left in my tank to turn to face the Reverend.
“Reverend McDonald, did you know I came to see you when I was ten years old? I came to you one Sunday after your sermon to ask for your guidance. At first I was reluctant to be completely honest. I started out by expressing a fear that I might have sinned so grievously that there could be no divine forgiveness. I was petrified that I’d be doomed to eternal damnation in the fiery pits of hell. I asked you what sin would be so abhorrent there could be no redemption, and you had the nerve to say “God has the capacity to forgive even the most evil among us if we confess our sins and see his atonement.” Must be nice to kill six million Jews, wipe out the Native Americans, fly a plane into a building full of civilians and still have a shot at God’s forgiveness. What a guy. Okay so hypothetically what sins besides murder would be so egregious that I would need to seek his forgiveness in order to avoid damnation? “Well I’m sure whatever it is you’ve done you’ve earned a spot in his good graces,” you said. Great. Just what I wanted to hear, thanks a lot father, you’ve been a big help. Tell that to the snail I lit on fire with the magnifying glass.”
The Reverend is stunned. Tears stream down my cheeks. The audience is restless, faces that began the day full of hope now transformed to faces warped by wrath. An emotion I know well. I meet my mother’s eyes and wonder if I’ve gone too far but she nods, a wry grin encouraging me, helping me to understand that it’s okay to finally let these idiots know how I feel.
“So what else is going to keep me out of Heaven? I eat bacon like a mother****er and do as many drugs as I can get my hands on but that doesn’t seem like enough to ensure I don’t wind up singing hymns and hanging out with dead priests for eternity. But I do know one thing that will do it.” I smile the biggest ****-eating grin and reach into my jacket pocket.
I pull out a detonator and push the big red button.
There is an enormous, deafening boom. The façade of the mega church bends, buckles, and crumbles as the explosives I planted two days ago do their work. The windows shatter like a sandstorm. Everyone screams and panics like a swarm of locusts. The Mayor stares at the fallen church, the center of the town’s economy collapsing in a cloud of black chaos. Over a hundred men and women draw guns they’ve been concealing in their waistbands.
The Reverend can’t take his eyes off me. A single tear stains his necktie. As the cops surround me and yell at me to stick my hands in the sky, the Reverend lifts the microphone and addresses the people of Lenton. He clears his throat, and the crowd, which had given up all hope of salvation in the rising tide of Hell, recognizes their leader.
The Reverend speaks.
“When I became Reverend, I did so out of faith. The undying, unquestionable belief that a greater power is out there, guiding me, guiding us, this community. I resolved to devote myself to the cloth even if I never saw him with my own eyes. I would do God’s will and avoid damnation. In the face of hardship, adversity, of the greatest doubt, I would still believe. My faith would not waver.”
The Reverend points at me. “Samuel the Saint has appeared before us. He saved me. He saved Mr. Patel and David. He is not Lucifer’s servant. He has done God’s will. It is God’s work. No act or test can prevent his salvation. Pardon him. Forgive him. Put your guns down. Pray for him.”
To my astonishment, nearly two thousand people join hands, and suddenly everyone is praying.
“If Samuel brought our church down, then he was performing God’s will. Samuel has come to help us build a bigger one in its place!”
Are you ****ing ****ting me?
The crowd goes wild. They are cheering. The Mayor offers me his hand. That afternoon, a woman gives birth to twin boys. She names them both Samuel.
Later, the arson investigators discover that the mega church was filled with rotting timber. It was a ticking time bomb, and if I didn’t plant those explosives, it would have likely caved in during Sunday service, effectively wiping the entire population off the face of the earth in one fell swoop.
I spend a year in jail pondering the irony.
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At least in the military, nobody gives a **** what your religion is. You just shut up, take orders, and do your duty. That’s why as soon as I got released, I enlisted.
I’m recounting this entire story to Mike, my atheist friend, as we wait in line for our assignments. I’m right where I want, about to ship off to Afghanistan, Iraq, or Mali or wherever the hell we’re indiscriminately snuffing people’s lives out these days, armed with a full license to kill. After saving all those lives, I figured I truly needed to tip the scales back in my direction. A real act of evil was now needed to join Satan’s ranks.
After all, everything I tried to do to earn my place in Hell just made the people I hated pay more attention to me.
In jail I realized that I’m a good man at heart. I want desperately into Hell, but I could never murder anyone in good conscience. That’s why government sanctioned killing is the golden ticket.
The clerk at the head of my line calls my name. He hands me documents containing my MOS – my military occupational specialty. I eagerly tear them open, feeling like a young boy on anti-Christmas. Lord Lucifer, here I come.
I drop the documents. The clipboard clatters to the ground. My stomach sinks.
The word emblazoned on the paper seems to wink at me. MEDIC, it reads. Medic?!
“Congratulations, son. You’re in for a long career of saving lives,” says the clerk. “The Good Lord’s work.”
Goddamnit.
Last edited by riverboatking; 01-11-2015 at 07:26 PM.
Reason: name explained.
you too.