Passing Lambs

May 1, 2008

Stopped at the crosswalk at the corner of 6th Avenue and 23rd Street, waiting for the signal to change, I stood next to a tall, thin man with sandy blonde hair, or was it gray? Although I stood right next to him, I didn't get a very good look, and most of what I saw was from the corner of my eye. In any case, his hair was short — or what would've been called long fifty years ago— something like a sixties surfer from California.

"You'd see 'em wearing their baggies. Huarachi sandals, too. A bushy bushy blonde hairdo—"

But instead of a surfboard, he was carrying a seven-foot-tall cross made of wood.

Where the two pieces of wood met, hand-painted on what looked like plastic, in a happy 1970s balloon font, was the name "Jesus." All in all, his prop didn't look particularly heavy by the way he was bouncing it up and down, not like an angry protester, more like a cheering football fan.

"Have you heard the gospel?" he asked me.

I turned to look at him.

"Have you heard the gospel?" he said again.

"Yup," I said, and turned my attention back to the walk/don't walk signal.

A few other people were waiting for the light, and more kept coming. The impatient ones began to spill into the street in anticipation of the changing light. A middle-aged guy, paunchy and unshaven with the hunched-over posture of someone who's worked in a record store his whole life, stepped off the curb and stood in front of me.

"Have you heard the gospel?" the surfer asked him.

The middle-aged guy didn't respond, other than to push the black-framed, thick-lensed, tinted glasses up his nose a bit.

"He has long arms," said the surfer. "He can reach down deep. If you're in a hole and you think no one can reach you, he can. He can reach down and pull you up. Reach down, down down and grab you—"

"Yeah, yeah," said the man, cupping his crotch. "Why don't you reach down and grab this?"

The light changed, and the crowd crossed the street. The surfer was unfazed, smiling, bouncing his sign, and giving the thumbs up to the passing lambs.

I worked later than expected and had to keep calling Brian every fifteen minutes to update our dinner plans. Six became six-thirty, six-thirty became seven. "Why don't I just call you when I'm on the street and I know for sure I'm done with work," I said.

We met near his apartment, in a touristy section of Manhattan (as if there is any other), in a little park on the corner of 6th Avenue and Bleeker Street. "How do you feel about Italian food?" said Brian.

"How do I feel about it in general? I'm amazed at how many names they have for essentially the same three or four ingredients."

"How do you feel about eating some right now?"

"Sure."

Once we'd settled and got the ordering out of the way, Brian stretched his arms out, cracked his knuckles, and sighed. "I'm going to give my two-week's notice at work," he said.

"Really? What are you going to do?"

"Take care of myself, get healthy." He's been bothered by a variety of illnesses for a few years, beginning with a mysterious third-world parasite he picked up on an around-the-world vacation. "My immune system is fucked," he said. "I need time to chill out, rest, and get well. I've been working my ass off for the past year, and I managed to set aside nearly a year's rent. I can pick up a little work here and there to supplement that, but mostly I just want to work on my screenplays. I have three of them right now, one that's almost finished."

"No shit," I said. "What about your novel?"

"It's not happening. I'm not the same person I was when I started it. I don't have the energy to keep up the smartass tone I started with. I'm too tired to make fun of everything."

“That makes one of us.”

Next to us sat a fat man in a suit. I couldn't tell if he'd already eaten, was waiting to be served, or was waiting to speak to the manager about something, but he wasn't eating, and his table was clean. He kept looking at us, and I assume he was listening to our conversation. I tried to motion to Brian, rolling my eyes and nodding my head, but I was too subtle. I shouldn't have cared, but sensing that the man was eavesdropping made me want to stop talking.

"I'll let you read the first one when I finish," Brian continued. "It's almost done. I have it all worked out in my head; I just need to finish writing it down. When I was at the Ashram for that meditation retreat, the whole movie became crystal clear. The characters, the story, everything hit me suddenly like a vision. I was so focused. They don't let you bring anything to write with, or write on, but I snuck in a pen."

The waiter brought the fat man a plate with three small Italian cookies on it, one of which was pink.

"Why can't you bring stuff to write with?" I said.

"You're only supposed to meditate, that's it. Meditate the entire time you're there. Twelve days. But I snuck in a pen. I had to scramble for something to write on, though, and pulled out every scrap of paper in my wallet, scrawling tiny notes on business cards and shit." He held up an imaginary pen as if pinched between his thumb and index finger and wrote tiny imaginary notes in the air.

"I've done that before," I said. "Funny though, sometimes I have a vague recollection of an idea and think, I wish I wrote that down, but the times I do, if I can even decipher what I wrote, I often wonder why the hell I bothered."

"No dude, this screenplay is awesome. You'll love it. I was in the bookstore the other day and saw a book about David Lynch, and apparently, that's what he does — his ideas come to him when he meditates. He clears his mind, and it comes to him. That's what happened to me."

"I like David Lynch movies, but I can't imagine what one of his screenplays looks like. Does he even write screenplays? If he does, they must be pretty annoying to read. ‘And then, this girl goes into her living room, but it's not really her living room it's this other place and suddenly she's not herself anymore, but someone else, and this guy shows up and you think it's one guy but it turns out to be this other guy from before who you forgot all about and then a midget shows up and says some stuff in a made up language,’— Imagine finding that written on the back of a business card?"

"No, dude, don't worry, it's awesome. But when I get around to making it, I'm going to need your help. I need you to make a fake newscast for me."