I HEAR THE messiah of Morris Avenue was seriously injured this morning,” said Gideon the Idiot at the beginning of his monologue. “Seems he was out jogging and got hit by a motorboat.”
Only two days after my Journal story had come out, and already the king of prime-time news was doing one-liners about Jay!
Nightly News with Gideon the Idiot was just one of several prime-time news webcasts anchored by comics, but it was easily the biggest. The others soon followed suit. The clown who fronted FoxWeb’s NewsBlog offered tips for dating a messiah (“If he talks about eating his body, do not throw him out. Find him some bread”). Lame parody B-attitudes were everywhere: “Blessed are the sedated, the caffeinated, the shopaholics, the erectile dysfunctional.” One sports shouter on SPN wondered, Could the “Savior in sneakers” save the Knicks from elimination in the playoffs? “Hey, Jay, there’s some sick and lame guys over in the Knicks locker room need a miracle!”
Several handles for Jay emerged, especially in New York media, which took a proprietary interest in the local divinity. They all included the Bronx in some way, usually going for alliteration rather than accuracy, such as “The Jesus of Jerome Avenue.” The one I liked was “Joe Christ” but it involved knowing that Jose was the Spanish for Joseph—too big a leap for most eyeballs.
The most outrageous reaction came from the Inquiring Mind. Kunihiro Yamamoto-Young ran a piece claiming he’d discovered the Mystery Messiah and I’d stolen his story. It was mostly a montage of messiahs I’d found and turned down (including one who’d given himself stigmata by driving tenpenny nails into his hands and feet), the suggestion being that Jay was just another Nut Log nut. That kid had balls of brass.
I suppose people who believed in Jay might have found all this offensive, but in a way I welcomed it. It got his name around far quicker than the straighter media and made him more accessible to people. We didn’t need suite cred at this point; I’d already taken care of the class end of the act with Kaminski. But I did want him to get known, to appear on the radar of the people he’d make see red.
Ironically, the story got a huge boost from the Reverend’s electrifying announcement. Unlike his co-religionists down the ages who’d often made the mistake of predicting the exact end of the world and then had seen the date pass without incident, the Reverend was no wolf-crier. He kept his flock on the edge of their seats year in, year out, by not being too specific. The Second Coming/Day of Judgment/Final Battle was “at hand,” “coming soon,” or “upon us,” but never “next Tuesday at 2 P.M.” Now, in front of hundreds of millions of souls, he’d said there was an exact day and had pledged to name it in six weeks.
Then, just a few days later, in the most important newspaper in the world, a cocky little ethnic messiah popped up to say that the Reverend’s whole scenario—and therefore his pledge—was a crock.
Don’t get me wrong. The story got good play, but outside of New York, no one exactly yelled Stop the presses!—even if there’d been any presses left to stop. Still, it was a personal vindication: After months of silence, my earphone finally started to buzz. I heard from several good friends who’d been noticeably absent from my life since the publication of the Greco Option five years earlier. Some were aghast and some helpless with laughter that I’d “gone over to the Lord.” Much the same was true of my comrades in the underground. Some were incensed—as I’d known they would be—by Jay’s “revanchism” on the poor, intelligent design, and so on. One female saw profound sexism in Jay’s “trope” of the Father God. Why wasn’t it the Mother God who controlled the forces of the universe? Why did she get fobbed off with “existence”? (There’s no pleasing some people.) A few of the godless called me (“confidentially, OK?”), in my new role as religious expert. They were the kind of people who’d once been made to go to a church or synagogue; enough had rubbed off that they were now worried the Reverend might be right. (I assured them he wasn’t.) Most importantly, a few got the big picture: that there were powerful political implications if Jay and his followers, and the emotions they aroused, could be harnessed, shaped, in some way grown.
But an awful lot of ordinary mortals were really intrigued by the idea that there was a guy walking around the tristate area who could do miracles.
Trouble was, I had no idea where the miracle man might be. He and the Apostle Posse had left town several weeks earlier and had not been heard from since. If María knew where they were, she wasn’t telling me. With a buzz beginning and Kaminski calling for a follow-up, Jay’s lack of whereabouts was frustrating. The media was ready to bump him and his mission (and me and mine) into the stratosphere, and I couldn’t produce the goods.
Midday on Saturday of the week the Journal piece came out, I got a call from someone monitoring the police scanner; there’d been a spontaneous celebration going on all morning up in the Bronx. The Messiah of Morris Avenue was home for the first time in over a year, and an impromptu fiesta was under way. Jay had been preaching and doing miracles and having a grand old time, and yours truly, the designated scribe, the man most responsible for all the excitement, knew nothing about it.
I got myself over to the Bronx and María’s place. She wasn’t there but everyone on the street knew about the fiesta, which had migrated over to one of the local parks. Apparently the word was out in all five boroughs that Jay had returned, and the cops were getting antsy about the crowds and the cars.
There must have been several thousand people in the park; a cop keeping an eye on things told me the NYPD had pegged the crowd at around five thousand earlier in the morning. He was a stolid foursquare young guy, dark olive skin, oiled jet-black head-bristles glistening in the sun, ALVAREZ on his name tag.
I asked him if he was around earlier. “Yeah, but I couldn’t hear much,” he replied. “The messiah guy wasn’t using a mike. People were real quiet. Then he started healing. I was assigned to the perimeter, so I couldn’t really see, but”—he shrugged—“people said there were, like, miracles.” He looked away with a tiny half-smile as if he secretly hoped what people said was true.
“Do you believe he can do miracles?” I asked. His eyes came back to mine with a glint of hostility.
“You media?” he asked and, when I nodded, cocked his head toward a far corner of the park. “Your people are over there.”
I walked through families and couples on the grass. It was Saturday, people’s day off, early May, a beautiful afternoon with a touch of winter chill and that sparkling, wind-washed, laundry-fresh cerulean blue that you never see anywhere quite the same as in New York in spring. A light that made the surly brown tenements of the Bronx look like they might have some hope; against which the gold-green leaf buds fluttered slightly in the brisk nor’wester blowing down the Hudson. Nature’s first green is gold.
There were impromptu stands with soda being sold from coolers, barbecues on which chicken and tacos and tortillas were cooking or keeping warm. I bought my first empanada of the year: delicious. Kids were playing soccer; dogs were all over the place; there were a lot of guitars and drums. Though the party was winding down there was still celebration in the air, people chatting in animated rings, some of them quite big, a dozen or more people sitting around sharing memories of the morning. I think they were memories anyway—my Spanish isn’t that great. Maybe it was just me and spring: there seemed to be a lot of smiling going on.
I couldn’t help wondering if it was like this the first time around. The language of the Bible is pretty flat, but the first time I read the Sermon on the Mount and the Feeding of the Five Thousand (if those two go together, I’m a little rusty), I sensed that it was a happy occasion. The man Jay said he once was had preached to ordinary working folks from a little hill and healed their sick and then fed all five thousand of them. Who cared if the feeding was a miracle or something more banal? It was a huge picnic with happy people, Jesus’ little Woodstock.
I realized I’d never seen Jay in action. Perhaps it was always like this.
Still, as I walked among the smiling faces and memories of excitement, that cantankerous spoiler of a voice that always lurks somewhere inside me couldn’t help sneering: Yeah, you’re smiling now but it won’t always be like this. It won’t always be songs and smiles. Just like that other sunny day long ago in Judea; humans will find some way to turn it all to shit. Nothing gold can stay.
Would I look back on this sunny spring day and all these sunny spring people and say, That was as good as it got?
Why was I even wondering this?
The guys and gals of the media were standing around intensely doing nothing, as is their wont. There was no sign of Jay or the Posse. One of them was a former colleague from the Inquiring Mind whom I knew well enough to avoid whenever I saw him coming, a Brit half my age and three times my weight. His name was Rodney, and his skin was amazingly white, even whiter than mine, as white as the belly of a Dover sole. So we called him Whitey from Blighty.
Whitey from Blighty congratulated me on my “triff” piece in the Journal. I asked where the messiah was and he got all riled up, as if the whole bloody thing was my bloody fault.
It turned out that as soon as the media showed, their humble purpose being (a) to be the first to put the Second Coming on camera and (b) the first to film an actual live miracle, Jay had gone stone-cold silent, stopped healing, and refused to be even still-photoed.
So he really meant that stuff about “The Revelation will not be televised.” I’d figured it was part of a nice subversive theory that might be magically forgotten once the cameras showed up.
The local lame and halt and their loved ones, deprived of his services, objected strenuously to the presence of the media. The media were miffed, accustomed as they were to people kissing their butts. Press freedom was at stake. The public’s right to know was at stake.
Jay had gone walkabout through the crowd, and when they tried to follow him and shoot him or pick up what he was saying, the crowd blocked them.
Several left in high First Amendment dudgeon. A few others tried to be investigative, shouting at Jay over the heads of the crowd—“What do you have to hide? Why are you scared of the cameras? Are you a charlatan?”—and other fearless shafts. The crowd soon shooed them away.
The ease of mind I’d been feeling began to melt into apprehension. I was media too. I hadn’t heard from the guy since my piece came out—hell, since I’d done the interview. Was I in the same doghouse as these bottom feeders? I needed to see him and find out.
At María’s place there were folks all over: in the courtyard, swarming up the stairwells, sitting in the lobby, quiet and patient, sitting on every available surface, all waiting for Jay. He’d gone with Rufus and Charlie to help out the worst of the cases who’d come to him in the park. In their homes without the media snooping.
María was animated, all over the place, defending the waiting people against the blustery building super, finding snacks and drinks for the kids, comforting sick babies, being everyone’s mom. For once the marked coolness she’d always shown me was gone. Perhaps the Journal piece had convinced her of my good intentions. She even sat down with me for a few minutes, happy to talk.
“It’s great to have José back, even though he says some things I don’t like.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“Well, I said to him I was glad to have my son home, my only real family. He takes my hands and says, ‘Mama, I have no home and family now. My family are Angela, Rufus, Charlie, Kevin, all the people God heals through my hands, and whoever else comes to me wanting help. My home is wherever I lay my head at night. Everywhere and nowhere.’ ”
I asked if there was anything he said she did like.
“Sí, sí, a million things. But especially when he preached about God the Mother. That was beautiful. I always knew God was a woman.”
“Do you think now your son is the Messiah?”
She shook her head, smiling. “I hope not!”
It was good to see Angela again. She’d put on weight and filled out in the obvious places. She certainly didn’t look sick. I asked her if she’d been tested yet, to be sure about Jay’s miraculous cure.
“Not yet,” she said. “We found out that you need to take these new comprehensive tests: to make sure the hyper-virus isn’t present? We just don’t have the money. Anyway, do I look like I have the plague?” It was true: A beautiful creature was emerging from the chrysalis of sickness.
A New Yorker born and bred, she was happy to be back in the city; the Bronx had been one of her stomping grounds when she was younger. “I got some . . .”—she hesitated a beat or two—“old friends in a bad place. I’m gonna bring them to Jay. He’ll heal what ails them.” She didn’t elaborate, but she had that same look of devotion on her face as when she spoke of her savior man. If he hadn’t been Almighty God, I’d have said Jay was one lucky guy.
Kevin was changed too, more sure of his role, which was emerging as the egghead of the group. “I’m the Apostolic Geek,” he said with a smile. “Rufus, Charlie, Angela—they’ve done things, been places, had terrible things happen to them. When we go into these tough nabes, and people see those three and hear their stories, they know they’re in good hands. It helps people believe. Like Jay says: It’s all about belief.
“The way I can help people believe,” said Kevin, “is by putting things together for them. So they understand that the things Jay says and does aren’t just isolated words and acts. There’s an overall consistency to them. A purpose. I mean”—he hesitated, as if not quite sure he should say what he was going to say—“I believe . . . I’m living . . . in the presence of God. God made flesh. Sometimes, when I’m with him, I can hardly bear the intensity of that; other times it seems so normal it makes me laugh out loud, you know?” He laughed and I almost did too. His intensity was infectious.
So that others might be helped by them, he wrote down his questions and possible answers, made notes of the paradoxes to which his beliefs led him, kept track of new things Jay said to the apostles or preached about. “I’m keeping a pretty detailed record of what he says and does.” Suddenly he got tongue-tied. “Not that I’d dream of trespassing, like, on your turf.”
My hackles stirred and went back to sleep. He was a good kid and smart. And he wanted to be a writer. I didn’t have the heart to slap him down.
“Far as I recall,” I said, “there’s room for four of us.”
He laughed and relaxed and told me about the impromptu parade that had erupted on the streets that morning. “It was amazing! Never seen anything like it in Kansas. Ribbons and streamers and balloons, Virgins of Guadalupe, thousands of candles you couldn’t see in the sunlight so people kept burning themselves with the hot wax? And man, that music! Cuban and gospel and mariachi and bossa nova and Catholic hymns all mixed up together: just total wonderful chaos!”
I asked him if anyone mentioned that Jay had been in the news and he said no, why? He hadn’t heard about the Journal American piece. He didn’t know if Jay had, but he hadn’t heard Jay or anyone else mention it, and he’d spoken to scores of people that day.
Of course. No one in the Bronx had read the piece—certainly not the folks who’d given Jay his parade that morning. Why would they? Even if they were webbed, they wouldn’t eyeball a publication as high-and-mighty as the Journal. They’d more likely spend their scarce free time and money on something like the Inquiring Mind.
But the Bronx had its own information sources, as reliable and opinionated as the Journal. People had been on the street that morning because Jay was famous in a sphere far out of reach of downtown eyes. His fame was in the bodegas and sweatshops and barbershops and on the street corners where laborers gathered at dawn; in construction sites and volunteer clinics and day-care centers and soup kitchens. It was strong enough to bring thousands out.
Kevin said, “There was a fascinating feeling on the street: like this combo of excitement and reverence? There’s an old-time word they used in my church back home sometimes? Deliverance. People talked like they thought Jay would bring them . . . deliverance.”
Without witnessing it, I knew what he meant. The ’hood wasn’t just fawning on a homegrown star. They believed something more tangible: that he would release them from the grinding lives and miserable places they lived, the systematic exclusion they suffered because some humbug somewhere believed they were worthless and unworthy, the deadbeats of the shining city on the hill.
The question was: Could Jay do that? There was a material component to deliverance that didn’t seem to be as much a priority for him as it was for them. These people needed schools and health care and jobs and the safety net their work and taxes paid for but which had been stolen from them. Jay delivered to perfection the message that they were equal, every individual as worthwhile as the next—the original American promise, in fact. But could he deliver the material component? Could he deliver deliverance?
“Later, in the park,” said Kevin, “he preached about God the Mother. It was beautiful. A lot of folks were weeping. I’ve heard him speak about Her before, but never like this. He spoke in Spanish and English mixed together, not Spanglish, exactly, more as if there were some things that were best said in one language and some in the other. It was almost like he was singing or chanting.”
Kevin said his Spanish wasn’t up to getting it down word for word, and Jay was moving through the crowd so he wasn’t always audible, but the sermon was less about specifics than conjuring up the presence of his Mother, bringing Her among the people then and there.
“One thing I could make out,” said Kevin, “was that every section of the sermon ended with the same five words, like a refrain, and everyone began joining in: Ella es amor. Puro amor. You could hear it spreading across the crowd, so there was a delay from the center to the edges, like a lake being ruffled by the wind.”
An old Catholic priest had sauntered up and stood on the edge of the crowd while Jay preached. Everyone seemed to know him; he kept shaking hands and clapping backs. After Jay finished preaching, Kevin collared him.
Father Michael Duffy, born and raised in the Bronx, was the parish priest at José’s childhood church, Aloysius Gonzaga, and had been for donkey’s years. I knew of him slightly. He’d been a thorn in the side of the archdiocese forever. Brilliant and magnetic as a young priest, he should’ve made bishop by now; but he was also an activist, unofficial chaplain to a militant lay group called Vox Populi and a host of other excellent troublemaking ventures. That’s probably why the hierarchy had left him up here—they hoped—to rot; instead, his parish was an oasis of life in the barren landscape of New York Catholicism. He preached in Spanish as fluently as in English or French (for the Haitians and West Africans) and had an overflowing church every Sunday.
Kevin asked Father Mike whether he knew Jay.
“Sure. Little José Kennedy. He was an altar boy up here.”
“A good altar boy?”
“No worse than the rest. Always fooling around at the Consecration, fighting over who got to ring the bell. Good point guard, though. Sweet hands.”
“What do you think about him saying he’s come to fulfill Christianity?”
“It’s about time someone did.” At this several hands were presented to Father Mike for him to high-five.
“Is he a threat to the Catholic Church?”
“Anything real is a threat to the Church.”
“What do you think the Church will do about him?”
“The Church has made the wrong decision about every crisis they’ve faced for the last fifty years. Why would they spoil a perfect record doing the right thing about José?”
And what would any Jay appearance be—without a miracle?
In the park where Jay was preaching, there lived an old bag lady. The locals called her Gaga because that was about all she ever said, other than monumental cursing. She’d shown up the previous summer. She was harmless and pathetic enough that the local shopkeepers gave her food when she stumbled into their bodegas; people tried to make her sleep somewhere warm if the temperature got dangerously low.
When Jay began healing she came stumbling through the crowd, mumbling obscenities. A line had formed in front of him. She staggered near to the front of it and flopped on the ground in a heap. People looked embarrassed, like this was a part of their neighborhood they weren’t too proud of but didn’t know what to do about. Some guy decided to shoo her away.
“C’mon, Gaga, go home now.”
But Jay gestured it was OK and went over and knelt next to her on the ground. She spat a stream of syllables at him.
Someone said, “She just a crazy old woman, Jay, she don’t know her name, don’t where she is, even. Ain’t nothing in her poor old head.”
“She got Alzheimer’s,” a big guy added.
Jay took the woman’s head in his hands and looked into her eyes. “Tell us your name,” he said. The old woman’s face puckered up and twisted, as if she was trying to curse. Then her eyes locked on to Jay’s. They blinked and opened wider and blinked again, as if she were peering through a dirty window and someone was sponging away the dirt.
“Al . . . Al . . .” She groped for a word.
People said, “Alzheimer’s! She’s trying to say Alzheimer’s!”
“Al . . . Al-thea . . .” said the old woman slowly.
There was complete silence everywhere around. You could hear people farther back shushing people behind them.
Jay said, “What’s your last name, Althea?”
The old woman struggled with a second word. Jay was still holding on to her head, but his eyes were closed now.
“G-g-g . . .” said the old woman, and she screwed up her face with trying. “M-m-m . . . g-g . . . Mc-Gon-a-gal!”
She stopped rocking and twisting her head and stared straight at Jay. Then she repeated her name softly, in a different voice: sweet and cultured like an actress in an old movie.
“Althea McGonagal.”
When she said that you could hear people, hundreds of them, go whoooooh! in amazement.
“Where do you live, Althea?”
“In Philadelphia.” The old woman sat up straight and straightened her back. She looked around, smiling, polite. “I’m sorry—where am I? How did I get here?”
Jay had had his eyes closed all this time. Now he opened them. “You tell us,” he said.
She thought for a moment. “Well, there was a very bad situation with my husband. I was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, you see, and he took up with a younger woman. Somehow they got hold of my retirement fund. I remember being evicted from my apartment. I don’t remember much after that. I was quite ill. I wonder how I got here.”
The big guy who said she had Alzheimer’s was staring down at her, his eyes big as golf balls. He and Jay helped her up. She looked a little dazed, but she was smiling.
Jay said, “Your husband died last year, after his woman friend left him. Your attorney has been trying to find you. Do you remember his number?” She nodded. He said, “Can someone lend this lady a phone?”
About a hundred and fifty phones appeared. She took one very graciously and strode over to a tree for a little privacy, shedding years as she went.
Everyone burst into applause.
Kevin’s notes were even better and more detailed than his verbal observations, full of little details and character sketches and local color that brought the day alive. He handed them over to me without a murmur. It would have been simple to write them up into an eyewitness account in my own voice. Instead, for the first time in several incarnations, I did something reasonably generous.
The story was called HOMETOWN MESSIAH COMES HOME TO JOYOUS WELCOME. The byline read By Johnny Greco with reporting by Kevin Duryea. It ran in the Journal American exactly ten days after the first story and made more noise than the first—because of all the you-are-there reportage by Kevin the Apostolic Geek. Needless to say, for that very reason, it was like throwing gasoline on a burning fire.