Be Common And Multiply

The nineteenth and final chapter of Carnival.

Carnival

Chapter 19

Be Common And Multiply

Kevin’s eyes burned. Though very nearly blind without his glasses, he was alert enough to realize it was no longer night, and that he was no longer alone. He was still collapsed on his side, and could dimly make out a figure sitting in a slump beside him. His nostrils relayed to his brain the presence of a nauseating stench.

The figure made a sound somewhere between a belch and a sigh. A jug of cheap wine was thrust in front of Kevin’s livid, terribly swollen face.

“’ere, par’ner,” a voice slurred. “Nothin’ like wakin’ up to a good snort o’ vino.” The figure began to hack repetitively--“ack-a, ack-a, ack-a;” little coughs that were so weak they were almost dainty. Finally he moaned, “Oh, mama! Oh, please! Oh, Jesus!” and closed his eyes. A thin stream of vomit rolled out his mouth and down his arm.

The terrible smell and this vague impression of a sick form lasted a while. It grew dark again, light again. Dark and light once more. Eventually Kevin became aware of a very loud, very scornful voice. Hands hauled him to a sitting position. Bit by bit he was yanked to his knees, to a half-standing slump, and finally upright. The outline of a thin woman’s face, laden with huge black-rimmed spectacles, was all he could make out.

“Shame!” her voice rang out; undulant, overwrought, disgusted. He saw a jaw drop. “Look at you!” She slammed his back against the wall to keep him propped while she pulled up and snapped his Levis. “Just look at you! Laying in the gutter drinking wine! Just. Look. At. You! And look at that man. Do you want to end up like him?”

Kevin looked at the unconscious blur.

The hands, locked on the front of his shirt, rocked him with hopeless urgency.

“Oh, why do you kids do it to yourselves? Why? What is it you want? Do you want us to listen to you? Well all right, we’re listening! Do you want us to see it your way? Okay, then, we’ll give it a try. But why do you have to do this to yourselves? Look at you! You’re all filthy and sloppy. You’re drunk and on dope. You just don’t give a damn, do you? And you’ve been fighting, fighting, fighting! All this high-horsing about love,” she mocked, “and peace,” she spat, “and then you go out and street fight and drink wine! Oh, you kids aren’t fooling anybody! Only yourselves, only yourselves!”

She shook him and shook him until his head rolled like a dashboard toy with a spring neck.

“Jesus God! Why won’t you kids listen!”

The hands shoved him away with failure and disdain, with wasted appeal. Kevin, staggering from the alley, went reeling down the sidewalk under the impetus of that shove, his head bobbing and weaving. He ricocheted off lampposts and wobbled into buildings, careened among quickly parting, cursing morning pedestrians.

A bus bench checked him. He stumbled into it from behind and was doubled at the waist. Kevin very nearly did a complete flip over the thing, and remained in check: weight supported by the wood backing, knees slightly buckled, torso bunched on the other side, arms splayed, head pressed back against the neck at an awkward and painful angle on the bench seat.

The picture of Adam and Eve mugged him; quick-punched his unblinking eyes, pinned his head with a vicious iron heel. His brain turned on a spit as memories seared it like tongues of flame…her sleeping face, inches away, framed by the powdery dawn. Her silly tears as she soothed the Afghan on Haight Street. Her eyes wide on the side of the coast highway, forehead pale from resting on her arms.

And the ugly truth burst on him like a wave: He’d been tricked, suckered.

Played for a fool.

She’d never cared for him, the b***h; she’d been leading him on. Played for a fool--the whoring c**t had played him for a fool!

Kevin, his wasted face purple with fury, summoned the strength to rise with savage images: he slapped her silly, he beat her senseless, he hurled her into her grave.

He buckled in remorse.

A bus rolled up with a fart of pneumatic doors and immediately roared away. A cloud of black diesel drove him choking to his feet.

Kevin whirled along, his arms before his face, doing a mad pirouette in a world that was a fluid blur; a world teeming with cursing and dodging shadow people, a world swimming with vague lumbering machines that honked and screeched as he danced among them.

And a blue field was filling his vision, darker than the sky and nearly as immense. This great body of water was impossibly placid, shimmering with fuzzy sunshine. Something resembling a serpent spanned the water in roller coaster swoops and climbs. Tiny jewels of bugs swarmed to and fro along a belt running just below the serpent. Toward this gleaming display Kevin was irresistibly drawn, as an infant is drawn to trinkets.

The metal-and-rubber boxes and the shouting flesh dolls grew more numerous as he neared. He shouted back, waving his arms, and somehow they parted. The waving of his arms deteriorated to a spiraling: Kevin whirled round and round, round and round. In this manner he proceeded across the bridge, twirling and dipping until his hand struck a cable and clamped a firm hold. His body was jerked to a halt, but his brain kept spinning; slowing, slowing, at last coming to a smooth merry-go-round rest.

Kevin climbed over the railing.

Everything was cool.

By simply placing one foot before the other and hanging onto these sweetly vibrating strings he found himself perched on a gilded platform, a cotton-soft catwalk. Far below lay the luscious bed of the bluer-than-blue bay. Kevin saw its warm heart concavely, so that the water seemed to reach up round the rim of his vision. He felt that if he let go he would not plunge--he would drift lazily like a dead, disengaged leaf…down down down to the blue water’s forgiving, all-encompassing bosom. Like such a leaf, the chorus to a popular song by Donovan Leitch floated into his thoughts, the lyrics contorting his lips:

Way down below the ocean

Is where I want to be;

She may be…

A strong hand seizing his forearm aborted his graceful planing descent. The hand jerked him so roughly he almost pitched back over the railing. Inches from his nose Kevin made out the pale, worried face of a middle-aged man in need of a shave. This man’s eyes were dark and sunken under oblique brows, as watery and illustrative of pathos as the drooping eyes of an aged bloodhound. The pinched mouth was formed into a perfect O of dismay, and emitted a rhythmic garlicky blast.

“Whoa, son. I said a-whoa there! That’s no way to solve your problems. That way lies nothin’ but sorrow and the forsakin’ of your immortal soul.” He hauled Kevin completely over the rail. Gripping the boy’s shoulder with one hand, he brandished a ratty copy of a familiar book in the other. “The Bible says you’re God’s temple, son; it says so right here in this glorious book in glorious black and white, and I can see it wrote in your eyes. And it goes on to say that if anyone destroys God’s temple then God’s gonna get mighty unhappy and destroy that sinner, just as sure as I’m standin’ before you now. And to that I say Hallelujah! I say Hallelujah, son! And mighty is the hand of God!” Kevin groaned and let his chin fall to his chest. Another one! Was the world really so full of them…could this dynamic, star-bound species--could this incredible animal that had produced everything from poetry to philosophy to telecommunications--could man really be, at heart, so intellectually infantile? The intruder looked on Kevin’s bowed head with keen concentration. “So you repent, do you? And just in time, I’d say. Glory in the wisdom of God! And Hallelujah! All thanks be rendered unto great God Almighty, who in Christ always leads us in triumph!”

A number of pedestrians had been drawn to the commotion. The soulsucker whirled on them, holding Kevin’s shoulder like a slave auctioneer. “Do ye all come to witness the salvation of a sinner in God’s eyes? Do ye see in this child’s pain sins native only to his own miserable soil? Well then let me tell you something, my friends, and that something’s that there ain’t a man among you any less guilty of sinnin’ before God. Oh, I know you may take the kiddies to church on Sundays, I know for the most part you may be decent enough folk, but I can see it in your eyes--you been fornicatin’ and covetin’ and carryin’ on and hopin’ the good Lord’s been lookin’ the other way. But let me tell you this: Even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light!” He released Kevin and pounded a fist in the air for emphasis. “I can see you snickerin’ an’ all, but I’m tellin’ you, if you don’t accept Christ as your healer your soul ain’t gonna be worth a damn. Not a damn! You’ll rot in Hell, just as sure as I’m standin’ before you now.” The groaning audience broke up and began drifting away. The street preacher took off after those making the long trek across the bridge, as the duration of his soul-baiting would be extended, unless his victims decided to toss him the two hundred and fifty feet down to the water, by well over a mile. “Hear my prayer, O Lord! Let my cry come unto thee! That’s all you got to do: jus’ get down on your ever-lovin’ knees and ask the Blessed Lord to accept your sinful soul. Is that so hard? Are you all that busy? Well, don’t be! Don’t let Satan get away with it no more! Let ’im know they ain’t no fun in fornicatin’, they ain’t no hope in covetin’, and they ain’t no time for philanderin’. And they ain’t no sense in carryin’ on!”

Kevin limped off the bridge the way he’d come.

The sun imploded, the sky went black, a dizzying rain lashed his hide and passed.

Something oblong cast a stark shadow upon him. He raised his heavy head, peered through blackened eyes.

A yellow sign on a slender pole looked down on him sternly.

State Highway 1 said the sign.

Kevin trembled all over, his breath rattling in and out. In a trance, he began taking faltering, rusty steps; the tin man following the yellow brick road to Emerald City, but with no sweet smiling girl to hold his big rigid hand.

It was a long walk.

He reeled through a dark tunnel, groped along a darker wall as traffic whizzed by, passed the Presidio golf course, and so came to the city streets. Far ahead he could see a green expanse capped by the tops of sycamores standing like sentries. As he drew nearer he made out the blurry figures of policemen. These policemen meant to prevent access to the park, but Kevin’s automatic pilot, by now a master of timing and obstacle skirting, took over in time to prevent his blundering into their clutches. When they moved down Fulton Street the boy stumbled into a wonderland of cherry trees peppering an endless spread of rolling lawn. He stepped through dainty Tea Garden streams with clumsy brontosaur feet, plodded mechanically over sunny flower gardens, kicked a meandering swath through the Rhododendron Dell. Everywhere was a foreboding stillness, a nightmare world of silence punctuated only by the cooing wind and the redundant quacking of ducks at Quarry Lake.

Kevin stopped. Where were all the people? There was only the dimly seen, unending panorama of the park, and this silence heavy as water. The hillocks and roads were littered with every imaginable form of debris, from beer cans to cellophane wrappers to abandoned sleeping bags to used condoms. It was as if a city had stood here, lived and breathed and fought and fornicated, and then suddenly been wiped from the face of the planet with only its waste for an obituary. Kevin stood hearing his stumbling heart while taking deep gulps of that silence. He stood watching over the mounds of garbage for what seemed hours, waiting with the silence, waiting for Death to step onstage.

And from deep in that silence came muffled rumbling, a tap dance of vibrations underfoot. The rumbling became the ominous clopping of a horse’s hooves, with the chill implication of carriages and headless riders. From the foggy corners of his vision the gloom condensed into a central shadow, the shadow into a huge dark form galloping up on a black steed.

“All right, clear out,” the rider called, and with an unconcealed nuance of menace. “The concert’s over, so beat it. The concert’s over.”

Kevin threw his hands over his head as the rider approached. Just before the stick came cracking across his knuckles he saw a cop dressed in riot gear on horseback. Mounties! Saddlepigs!

“Out of the park, f****r!” the cop was spitting, swatting at Kevin’s shoulders and hands. The boy could only protect his head with his arms and gallop Quasimodo-wise as the cop whacked him and the horse’s hot foul breath lashed the back of his neck.

“Move it, f****r, move it! And don’t kick all the s**t you left behind. Have a good party, prick? Huh? Whose c**k did you suck? I said move it, f****r, move it!”

Kevin moved it, screaming, hobbling along like a bike with one training wheel. He felt his face raked by branches, felt his right foot encounter only space, felt concussions on his knees and elbows as he tumbled screaming, head over heels down a rocky grade. At the bottom he picked himself up and staggered down a rose-bordered walk. He brought a hand close to his streaming eyes. The hand was swollen and throbbing, discolored in half a dozen spots. He tried to flex his fingers but could manage only the pinky and thumb. He tried to swivel his head, but his neck was bruised and stiff.

He shuffled along, a creature articulate in limps, stumbles, heaves, and spasms. The park, as far as he could tell, was still deserted, but occasionally he could hear the cries of wild humans, whooping, shouting, upending trash cans. There was a hint of smoke in the air; the burning of scrub far away in the park. To Kevin’s left rose the sound of humans stampeding in terror. A moment later there came a quick-flight clopping of hooves. A small explosion to his right was followed by the distant scream of an automobile’s engine at high revolution. One by one the noises sorted themselves out and left him alone with the silence.

Kevin strained his neck. Several bulges decorated his misty world, but nothing presented itself as a possible mounted policeman. After a minute he leaned against a tree and slowly slid to the ground.

He was undoubtedly still in the park, for all this green could only be trees and grass. Ahead, a flat stretch of blue pond reflected the sun. Kevin was sedated by a feeling of completion, of finality. The peace and this green expanse reminded him of cemeteries he had explored on happier occasions, when the world’s deceitfulness had been veiled by his simple trust and basic decency. And suddenly he knew why Fate had aspired from the beginning to lead him here, and prevented his meeting his end in a hundred less creditable places. There was a real beauty to abandoning the flesh in such a garden of truth and human awakening. Eddie would gladly have chosen this very spot, but poor Eddie had most likely met his demise in an appalling barred pit under the gloating scrutiny of the Government. Kevin was ready, then. He knew he was ready to die.

No. Not all was sickness and perversion. Somewhere out in the thick of that warped serpentarium we call society there walked a slender goddess who had taught him love, although she had, almost casually, also taught him despair. Everything was in apple pie order. There’s no mystery to it at all. Love is fool’s gold. And he was a fool.

But love is all gossamer illusion--according to Eddie it didn’t exist at all. Then what, Kevin wondered, was this singular feeling he was experiencing? What was the name of the emotion that had crippled him? He felt cheated, betrayed, abandoned. And coupled with these pains was the awful knowledge that he would still risk even greater pain for the one who had abandoned him.

Just to touch her face, or smell her hair.

For these little things Kevin knew he would willingly, would gladly allow himself to be wounded anew.

“Hello?”

The voice sounded strange, hollow. Kevin slowly, expectantly raised his head. Distinct within the blur, he saw that his angel had come for him.

“Hello,” he replied. “I’m ready.”

The angel had very pale skin. Her figure had a Renaissance chubbiness, her face a rosy-cheeked fullness, and she turned her head a little in confusion at the boy’s reply. Then she beamed.

“I’m glad,” she said. “I wish the whole world was ready.”

Kevin sighed, saying with difficulty through swollen lips and missing teeth, “Why not? I lost the only thing that really mattered. There’s nothing left to live for.”

The angel came down on one knee, moving her face close enough for Kevin to see her concern.

“Oh, you mustn’t think that! There’s just so much to live for. Why, I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t laugh, or thank God how lucky I am to be alive on His wonderful Earth.”

Kevin sighed again, a deep, autumnal sigh of resignation. “Then you are lucky. You must be the only one in the world who thinks like that.”

Kevin felt a hand clutch his. He heard the angel say, very softly, “Would you like to meet some more lucky people?”

He couldn’t answer, baffled by the no-nonsense reality of her grip, paralyzed by her nearness.

She tugged gently, but persuasively. “Come on. And don’t be afraid. Salvation is waiting for you with open arms.”

The boy stood and hobbled along beside her, allowing himself to be led. Now he was limping closer, and could hear she was humming an oddly familiar tune in a carefree young manner.

He said gropingly, “I--I don’t even know your name.”

“Rose,” she said, beaming again. “My friends call me Rosy.”

“I like Rose better…pretty name. I’m Kevin.”

They stopped. A huge yellow school bus blocked their way. Religious graffiti seemed to take up every inch of the old vehicle, and the two words--JESUS SAVES--nearly an entire side. The angel led him up steps into the bus.

“Hi Jerry, hi Mark, hi Brenda. I want you to meet Calvin.”

The guy sitting in the driver’s seat spun around and pumped Kevin’s hand exuberantly, presenting him with the most psychopathic smile the boy had ever seen.

“Calvin, the man! I love you, brother. I love you!”

“You do?” Kevin turned to the angel. “I--I don’t understand.”

He felt another soft hand placed gently on his arm, and a different girl’s voice ask, “What don’t you understand, Calvin?”

“He said--he said he loves me.”

“We all love you, Calvin.”

Kevin’s confusion was so great his first instinct was to flee. Before he could do anything to prevent it, he felt tear after tear roll saltily down his cheeks. He swayed. Hands helped him to a place in the back of the bus. Kevin sat heavily.

“I’m--I’m sorry to act like this,” he bubbled.

The angel patted his hand. “You don’t have to be ashamed to cry, Calvin. Jesus wasn’t ashamed to weep for our sins, and, bad and wicked as we all are, he loves us anyway.”

Kevin slowly shook his head. “I don’t see how you can talk about love like that. I was in love, and I gave, and she just chewed me up and spitted me out, and love is phony and she was fickle and--and…” his rambling words ended in a gasp of exhaustion. Amazed, he felt his head eased to rest against the angel’s warm bosom. He heard her pure heart beating regularly against his ear.

“There’s a bit of Judas in us all,” she whispered. “But the only way to show them is to love them, and to turn the other cheek.” She paused. “What was her name?”

Kevin sank ever deeper into the fleshy warmth. “Rose,” he mumbled, “oh, Rose.”

The angel giggled. “Not me, Calvin. What was your girlfriend’s name?”

“Her name? Her name was--was…gosh, now I can’t even remember.”

“See?” said Rose. “See how silly it is to worry?”

A close scraping sound. A quiet voice asked, “Is he ready?”

Rose tested Kevin’s temple with a forefinger. “Nice and soft.”

He heard the old engine kick over and die. There was laughter up front, then the sound of a cheap guitar being tuned. The driver tried twice more. The engine turned over wearily.

“Hallelujah!” came a chorus from all around. “Praise Jesus!”

“Praise Jesus,” Rose echoed.

“Where’re we going?” Kevin asked.

“We’re going to heaven, all of us.”

Kevin sighed and let himself lay full-out, his head on the angel’s lap. She very gently eased the hat’s chin strap about his jaw until it was limp in her hand, and carefully removed the hat. Slowly a smile grew on his battered face. He closed his eyes.

One of the girls gasped. “Look! Look! Look at Rosy and Calvin! It’s the Pieta. The La Pieta!”

There were several gasps of awe. Kevin sighed again and nestled in the warmth, unashamed.

“Praise Jesus!”

The guitarist strummed a wobbly chord, but it was the sweetest sound Kevin had ever heard. Then the whole busload was singing:

“That’s the way God planned it.

That’s the way God wants it to be.”

The angel’s warmth became his universe, her heartbeat his, and Kevin was unaware that the gears of the bus had changed, that they were slowly rolling along.

“That’s the way God planned it.

That’s the way God wants it to be.”

Jerry steered the bus over Golden Gate Bridge, up Highway 101 to Mill Valley, then caught Highway 1 to the coast.

On one side of the road a couple of Highway Patrolmen were sitting on their parked motorcycles, sharing a thermos of lukewarm coffee in the shade of a billboard. They both saw the bus coming, and their groans were simultaneous. Over the gargling sound of the engine they could hear laughter and voices ringing:

“That’s the way God planned it.

That’s the way God wants it to be.”

“Well, well,” said one of the officers. “The carnival’s in town.”

Jerry, grinning insanely, noticed the patrolmen and leaned out the driver’s window, flashing the peace sign with his left hand.

The other officer cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted, “Jesus saves S&H Green Stamps!”

Jerry honked and waved.

The officers laughed and waved back.

The bus continued lumbering up the road, seemingly dwindling in size. The laughter and singing grew fainter. The bus rounded a bend and vanished.

awgus 18 1967

jime

praz thu lord

i jus wish u kood b her 2 fin gzus lik me

i no now i wuz supozd 2 rid up her

i misd thu big kawnsrt in thu prk but i joend thu bigr kawnsrt uv gawd

insid iz litruchr literusher stuf frum owr chrch

i hop u wil red it in tim 2 sav ur sinfol sol bi taken thu lord gzus az ur savyr

i pra 4 u ech minut uv thu da jime

frst i pra 4 ur lag an thn i pra 4 ur hrt an thn i pra ul sa ur uh sinr an lt gzus tuch u

plez jime plez dont mak gawd go an gt mad at u or u mit az wl fas it ur uh gawnr

thaerz stil tim 2 repnt an remmbr that at owr chrch we r awl polen 4 u jime

ps

im kawld bruthr kalvn up her but u kan snd yr mune 2

krist r us chrch

pos awfis bawx 10095

ureku kaluh4nu

sa halulooya jime

bls awl gawdz childrun hoo r awl bruthrz an sistrz in gzus wich iz wut thu bibl sz an thu bibl iz thu wrd uv gawd awlmit hoo luvz u jime an hoo kan fix ur lag if u wil onle sa yr uh sinr

so jime plez praz gzus thu fawthr thu sun an thu hole gos

amn

bruthr kalvn

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