Da Easter Bunny Code -- chapitre trois*
Jan. 9th, 2008 09:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
realthog[*Note to Ayn Rand fans: this is not a reference to Helen of Trois.**]
[**Note to real diehard Ayn Rand fans: Helen of Troy was this beauteous queen in the ancient world. She had a religious relative called Chretien de . . . oh, never mind.]
Yes, folx, it's time to move away from the dizzying delirium of those star-crossed lovers whose names even I temporarily forget (thereby postmodernistically creating yet another point of verisimilitude between this neo-Dostoevskyan epic and the work of Dan Brown) -- those star-crossed lovers whose names I have just looked up in the earlier postings of their adventures, viz:
http://realthog.livejournal.com/6036.htm
http://realthog.livejournal.com/7386.htm
http://realthog.livejournal.com/9369.htm
http://realthog.livejournal.com/12927.html (the similarly astonishingly poignant Chapitre "Donald" Deux).
As I say, in this chapitre we leave Roger Lapin and his breathy telephonic French babe to one side briefly
Chapter 3
Pope Jimbo I lay in the platinum-plated Vatican jacuzzi (with
diamond-inlaid gold and silver taps done by Faberge of Paris in
1790, when that company's domestic royal trade had dropped off a
bit sudden), staring at the ceiling mural -- one of
Michelangelo's lesser known works, The Resurrected Jesus
Reveals Himself to Mary Magdalene -- and trying to think
holy thoughts.
After a while he shifted uneasily, sloshing hot holy water
dangerously close to the rim.
All right, if holy thoughts were beyond him he could at
least shoot for innocuous ones. Fields of wildflowers in
the springtime, blue skies and puffy white clouds, Santa Claus
and the Easter . . .
No, not that.
Besides, the stratagem wasn't working.
Try as he might to focus on nothing but the holy face of
Christ in the painting overhead, his gaze kept slipping to the
figure of Mary Magdalene alongside the Saviour. Michelangelo had
espoused the theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had married
each other, or at least got it on pretty heavily between
miracles, and the painted image made it abundantly clear why the
Son of God would have surrendered entirely to his Son of Man
side. The great Florentine artist, although born not in Florence
but in Caprese, Tuscany, had depicted her as the sixteenth-
century equivalent of a Bunny girl. Presumably Michelangelo's
near-contemporary Leonardo had tipped him off about such future
inventions as the zipper, the mini skirt and black patent
leather; whatever the case, those few garments the Mary Magdalene
on the ceiling could loosely be said to be wearing she was
busting out of in all directions.
Jimbo wondered how many Popes before him had lain here in
this self-same jacuzzi and thought roughly the same thoughts
-- to wit, Where can I get a ladder?
The holy water in the jacuzzi had been cold when he'd
climbed in.
But his own distinctly non-holy thoughts were -- or at
least he guessed they were -- complexified far more than
those of any previous Holy Father's might have been.
Try how he might, whenever he gazed at Mary Magdalene he did
not see the face Michelangelo had painted there.
Instead he saw that of a woman he had recently met, and
whose fragrant presence he could not exorcise from his mind.
This was not a new experience for him.
It had happened before.
But not since he had been anointed to the throne of Saint
Peter.
Which itself had been an unusual move by the Conclave of
Cardinals assembled after the untimely death of his predecessor.
("Untimely death", thought Pope Jimbo irrelevantly.
Now there's an odd phrase if ever I did see one. When exactly
is a death "timely"?)
But then Pope Jimbo's succession had been an unusual one.
As indeed had been his theological training -- for a
Pope, that is.
Because it had been nonexistent.
Which was not surprising.
Because Jimbo I was an exceedingly unusual Pope.
As Popes go.
He couldn't speak Latin, for example. Indeed, as an
American, he had quite a lot of difficulty with the English
language, let alone any other.
He was still uncomfortable with his new professional
moniker, "Pope Jimbo". He was far more accustomed to -- still
thought of himself as -- his previous performing name, Bad
Rapper. It was as Bad Rapper that he had first come to public
notice.
Well, not quite.
He had first captured the public attention a short
while earlier than that, when the Brooklyn cops had arrested the
erstwhile Dwaine Ribble over a domestic disturbance in which he
had, in strict point of fact, been the injured party rather than
the injurer (a particular that he for obvious reasons played
down). When the cops had found "suspicious substances" in his
apartment (he likewise later made little of the fact that a bag
of flour had burst so he'd thriftily stowed as much of the stuff
as he could salvage in plastic Ziplocs rather than throw it out)
they'd thrown him against the wall a few times then hauled him
out onto the street in handcuffs. There, with the customary
incoherence of anyone who's being punched repeatedly in the groin
for being black, he'd tried to explain his innocence to anyone
who'd listen -- "bitch slapped me, tried to struggle
free, you guys came along, I ain't done no wrong, I contribute to
the Police Athletic Fund, no need to point that badass gun, just
mutherfuckin flour is all, ain't I allowed to make my one phone
call?" He hadn't realized one of his vigilante neighbours had
been recording the entire scene on a webcam (nor had the cops, or
there'd have been more than one groin getting punched), nor that
said vigilante neighbour would go and sell the recording to the
Lou Dobbs Show at CNN, far less that Dobbs might actually
broadcast it. What he had even less realized than all of
this, his mind being on other things at the time -- notably
his groin -- was that there coincidentally happened to be a
troupe of buskers playing just a few yards up the sidewalk while
all this was going on.
Well, Dobbs did play the recording that night --
along with another one supplied "for balance" by the Swift Boat
Veterans for Truth in which a stack of rich white people said
they knew for a fact that the arrestee had been sunning himself
in Hawaii at the time and anyway did he have any proof that he
actually possessed a groin? -- and the precinct phone
practically rang itself off the hook as entertainment managers
called offering ever-larger sums for the honour of arresting this
highly talented musician they'd seen on CNN. The arraignment the
next day had been mobbed by journalists in hot pursuit of the
latest rapping sensation, and the judge had obligingly lifted
reporting restrictions. The video of Dwaine giving his testimony
had been played endlessly on MTV, partly because Dwaine's ex-
girlfriend, her knuckles theatrically bandaged, had sought to
distract the judge's attention with a succession of wardrobe
malfunctions, and the testimony itself had shot straight to the
top of the New York Times singles charts, where it had
stayed for a total of six months and seventeen days. "I As Pure
As the Driven Snow, Oops My Lawyer Said that Phrase Was a Fuckin
No-No" had nailed a Grammy, Dwaine had nailed a case-dismissed
verdict, the judge had nailed the ex-girlfriend, and everyone was
happy.
And so Bad Rapper was born.
Except that had required an accident or two along the
way as well -- indeed, Pope Jimbo reflected as the
temperature in his jacuzzi unflaggingly rose, his entire life
could be read as a chapter of accidents. He'd initially wanted to
be called Bad Wabbit, but the manager who'd made him the best
offer over the precinct phone on that bleakly started night had
misheard him, what with the crackly line and the background noise
of suspicious groins being interrogated.
This first megahit -- Pope Jimbo still winced when he
thought the term -- had been followed by a string of others.
The world would have been Bad Rapper's oyster if only he could
have thought of a rhyme for it. Fame. Money (although less of it
than one might think, for reasons his manager had patiently
explained). Women -- hoo, boy, the women. Bad Rapper had
drawn the line at Ann Coulter, but he'd accepted just about every
other female who'd thrown herself at him. He'd given up on
wearing clothes for the best part of a year because all the
dressing and undressing had been giving him friction burns.
And then there had come the invitation to the World Rappers'
Convention in Rome. Bad -- as his friends called him --
had been eager to attend, even though his manager told him
repeatedly that his financial reserves were insufficient to cover
the plane fares. One proposed change of managers later, that
little problem had been solved.
The convention itself had been a bit of a blowout -- how
the hell could Bad Rapper have been expected to read the small
print at the bottom of the flyer, or know there was a Rome in
Peoria, Illinois? -- but luckily a bunch of other rappers had
made the same mistake, and together they'd turned the occasion
into a weeks-long alcohol- and carnality-fuelled party that was
believed by some theorists to have been the direct cause of the
heart attack sustained by a scandalized and elderly Pope. (Jimbo
himself thought it was probably Michelangelo's rendition of Mary
Magdalene, but ever since being told of his own infallibility
he'd tended to keep his lip buttoned about anything he wasn't
100% certain of.)
Partying as he'd been, he'd barely noticed the demise of the
previous papal incumbent. Yes, there'd been a lot of extra
tourists on the streets of Rome. Yes, it was odd that women's
fashions had abruptly lurched in favour of one-piece black
outfits that went all the way from head to toe. Yes, it was
intriguing that Tom Lehrer's "The Vatican Rag" had vanished
overnight from the jukebox of every bar in the city. But Bad
Rapper hadn't put all of these things together, being in
the midst of his creme de menthe phase at the time. He'd
been sufficiently conscious, though, when one of his fellow-
rappers had momentarily peeled him off a couple of lady
gondoliers -- well, that was what it said on their invoice,
anyway -- to register the information that there was a furry
party being held the next Tuesday night.
Renting himself a Barney the Dinosaur outfit from a nearby
theatrical costumier had been easy enough, despite his alcohol
haze -- although Bad Rapper didn't think the costume was an
especially good likeness of Barney, it was brightly coloured and
cheap -- but following the street directions his friend had
scribbled on the back of a paper napkin proved more tricky.
At last, wandering aimlessly through the streets of Rome in
the belief that sooner or later he must surely chance upon the
party venue, Bad Rapper had stumbled upon a procession of people
similarly attired to himself.
His instincts had guided him right after all!
The other party-goers were strangely quiet and solemn, but
he assumed this was just because they were saving their energies
for the fur-clad bacchanalia to come. Depressingly few of them
appeared to be young and female, but who could really tell what
sex or age they were under their costumes? The building into
which the merrymakers trooped was a bit dour, he thought, as
indeed was the large chamber into which they were eventually
ushered, but, hell, who was going to notice any of that when the
massage oil came out?
The preliminary chanting seemed to go on interminably, and
Bad Rapper fell asleep during it. Most of it didn't even rhyme,
and he strained his ears in vain for a single reassuring
"mutherfuckin".
He'd woken up eight hours later to someone throwing cold but
oddly different water on his face. By the time he'd
properly realized what was going on he'd been standing in front
of one of the biggest concert audiences he'd ever faced.
"Shit, these muthafuckas done gone and made me Pope, means
no more pussy, not even a grope," he'd extemporized -- and
the crowd had gone wild.
The artist within him would later decide that he'd been
unwise to carry on improvising in this vein, but at the time,
grinning, he'd been unable to resist the tides of mass adulation
flowing his way.
"Still don't stop the fact that I got the ol' itch, so be
sure to call me if you's a bitch."
The hordes loved that too, but even so the new Pope was
hustled inside before he could vocalize any further divine
revelations, and since then the cardinals had tried to pare his
schedule of public appearances to an absolute minimum.
Yet the force of popular demand could not be resisted, and
they'd had no choice but to trot him out on every occasion. And,
like Pope John Paul II, he'd been a travelling Pope. As Bad
Rapper he'd never quite achieved the status of a world tour. Now
he could have -- and did have -- several of them a year,
and triumphant ones at that, with capacity crowds at every venue.
Worldwide, it wasn't just Catholics who adored the latest
ascendant to Saint Peter's throne. He seemed to put into words
the most profound emotions of their innermost spiritual cores.
His singles had been smash bestsellers before, but now numbers
like "Fuck Me, It's Christmas Again Already" and "I Thought
Fatima Was That Gandhi Dude" moved into a different -- and
stratospheric -- league. MTV was impelled to open up a whole
new channel devoted entirely to his videos. Britney Spears
swiftly divorced herself and made a proposal of marriage before
it was explained to her that "celibate" and "jailbait" were,
like, two totally different concepts. The Grammy
ceremonies each year more and more resembled a full-scale
Popeathon.
And in the Vatican, as global congregations skyrocketed, the
cardinals congratulated each other on the choice they had made
-- or, more accurately, that God had made -- on that
long-ago Tuesday evening when someone had said, "'Course, whoever
draws the short straw and gets picked to be It will have to make
nice with President Bush" and only one person had been left
there, sprawled across two chairs and snoring peacefully, when
the room had cleared.
But the odd thing was that it wasn't just in the matter of
attracting new communicants that Jimbo turned out to be one of
the best Popes the Catholic Church had ever known.
Something had happened to him at the moment he'd been
consecrated in the job, some epiphany of the soul.
Perhaps because of his youth on the mean streets of
Brooklyn, confronting daily the problems of the urban poor rather
than considering them theoretically from some insulated suite in
the Vatican, he'd embarked on a campaign of reform almost from
the moment of taking office.
Enormous donations were given to the relief of poverty and
starvation in the Third World. The radical revision of the
language of the Mass had been one of the hardest things to drive
through, but even the program's initial detractors could not deny
the astonishing success of what was now called the Acid House
Stomp. Reversing centuries of opposition, the Vatican today
thoroughly endorsed contraception, and a healthy proportion of
Church funds was diverted toward the distribution of free
condoms, hereinafter known universally as jimboes. Pope Jimbo's
"Gay Liberation Blessing, This Shit Ain't Even Worth Confessing"
outsold even the latest re-release of Elton John's ode to
Princess Diana. Women were actively recruited for ordination into
the priesthood. Priests were encouraged to marry. Altar boys were
issued with mace canisters. The Pope's admonitory address to the
American television news networks -- "You a Heapa Lyin' Shite
in the Pockets of the Right" -- so shamed the moguls at their
heads that they began to broadcast the truth, thereby leading
promptly to the election of the first non-Bush US President in
generations.
And so the list went on.
The world was a better and a freer place because of the
reign of Pope Jimbo.
No wonder he was revered.
The wonder was that . . .
Well, with clerical celibacy having gone the way of the
dodo, how come the guy at the very top, who could have picked a
different vixen to share his jacuzzi every day of the year, was
lying here alone?
It was that epiphany of the soul he'd had.
Not so many years ago he'd been a starving WalMart employee,
trying to get by on a pauper's wages while getting beaten
shitless every week or two for possibly harbouring thoughts about
joining a union, asking for a raise, or telling anyone about the
way he got locked in every time he worked the night shift. Then,
by accident, he'd become an entertainment superstar . . . but he
hadn't really been happy, despite all the women, song, women,
wine, women, drugs, women, money, and women. So then another
accident had come along, and he'd been made Pope. And now he
really was truly happy, and not just because his
ghostwritten autobiography, God Don't Take "Fuck Off" for No
Answer, spelling out the graphic details of his earlier life,
had instigated the mass boycotts of WalMart -- and not just
because the Vatican had bought the near-bankrupt organization for
a song and turned it into a worldwide workers' cooperative. It
was more because the person who had once been Dwaine Ribble had
at last found a position in life that suited him, one that he
felt he could be genuinely proud of.
And he felt that he owed all this to God.
It seemed only fitting that, by way of return, he should
offer God something he valued above all else.
What God would actually want with Jimbo's sex life
was something Jimbo determinedly didn't think about -- the
same way he determinedly didn't think about whether or not God
was aware of his occasional lapses with the inflatable Julia
Roberts doll he'd ordered online from Amazon.com.
So the one celibate person left in the Catholic Church was
the person at its very head.
Which was fine by Pope Jimbo.
Except when he was in the papal jacuzzi looking up at
Michelangelo's Mary Magdalene.
And particularly except on days when he'd met . . .
No, better not to think about . . .
Her.
Pope Jimbo I lay in the platinum-plated Vatican jacuzzi (with
diamond-inlaid gold and silver taps done by Faberge of Paris in
1790, when that company's domestic royal trade had dropped off a
bit sudden), staring at the ceiling mural -- one of
Michelangelo's lesser known works, The Resurrected Jesus
Reveals Himself to Mary Magdalene -- and trying to think
holy thoughts.
After a while he shifted uneasily, sloshing hot holy water
dangerously close to the rim.
All right, if holy thoughts were beyond him he could at
least shoot for innocuous ones. Fields of wildflowers in
the springtime, blue skies and puffy white clouds, Santa Claus
and the Easter . . .
No, not that.
Besides, the stratagem wasn't working.
Try as he might to focus on nothing but the holy face of
Christ in the painting overhead, his gaze kept slipping to the
figure of Mary Magdalene alongside the Saviour. Michelangelo had
espoused the theory that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had married
each other, or at least got it on pretty heavily between
miracles, and the painted image made it abundantly clear why the
Son of God would have surrendered entirely to his Son of Man
side. The great Florentine artist, although born not in Florence
but in Caprese, Tuscany, had depicted her as the sixteenth-
century equivalent of a Bunny girl. Presumably Michelangelo's
near-contemporary Leonardo had tipped him off about such future
inventions as the zipper, the mini skirt and black patent
leather; whatever the case, those few garments the Mary Magdalene
on the ceiling could loosely be said to be wearing she was
busting out of in all directions.
Jimbo wondered how many Popes before him had lain here in
this self-same jacuzzi and thought roughly the same thoughts
-- to wit, Where can I get a ladder?
The holy water in the jacuzzi had been cold when he'd
climbed in.
But his own distinctly non-holy thoughts were -- or at
least he guessed they were -- complexified far more than
those of any previous Holy Father's might have been.
Try how he might, whenever he gazed at Mary Magdalene he did
not see the face Michelangelo had painted there.
Instead he saw that of a woman he had recently met, and
whose fragrant presence he could not exorcise from his mind.
This was not a new experience for him.
It had happened before.
But not since he had been anointed to the throne of Saint
Peter.
Which itself had been an unusual move by the Conclave of
Cardinals assembled after the untimely death of his predecessor.
("Untimely death", thought Pope Jimbo irrelevantly.
Now there's an odd phrase if ever I did see one. When exactly
is a death "timely"?)
But then Pope Jimbo's succession had been an unusual one.
As indeed had been his theological training -- for a
Pope, that is.
Because it had been nonexistent.
Which was not surprising.
Because Jimbo I was an exceedingly unusual Pope.
As Popes go.
He couldn't speak Latin, for example. Indeed, as an
American, he had quite a lot of difficulty with the English
language, let alone any other.
He was still uncomfortable with his new professional
moniker, "Pope Jimbo". He was far more accustomed to -- still
thought of himself as -- his previous performing name, Bad
Rapper. It was as Bad Rapper that he had first come to public
notice.
Well, not quite.
He had first captured the public attention a short
while earlier than that, when the Brooklyn cops had arrested the
erstwhile Dwaine Ribble over a domestic disturbance in which he
had, in strict point of fact, been the injured party rather than
the injurer (a particular that he for obvious reasons played
down). When the cops had found "suspicious substances" in his
apartment (he likewise later made little of the fact that a bag
of flour had burst so he'd thriftily stowed as much of the stuff
as he could salvage in plastic Ziplocs rather than throw it out)
they'd thrown him against the wall a few times then hauled him
out onto the street in handcuffs. There, with the customary
incoherence of anyone who's being punched repeatedly in the groin
for being black, he'd tried to explain his innocence to anyone
who'd listen -- "bitch slapped me, tried to struggle
free, you guys came along, I ain't done no wrong, I contribute to
the Police Athletic Fund, no need to point that badass gun, just
mutherfuckin flour is all, ain't I allowed to make my one phone
call?" He hadn't realized one of his vigilante neighbours had
been recording the entire scene on a webcam (nor had the cops, or
there'd have been more than one groin getting punched), nor that
said vigilante neighbour would go and sell the recording to the
Lou Dobbs Show at CNN, far less that Dobbs might actually
broadcast it. What he had even less realized than all of
this, his mind being on other things at the time -- notably
his groin -- was that there coincidentally happened to be a
troupe of buskers playing just a few yards up the sidewalk while
all this was going on.
Well, Dobbs did play the recording that night --
along with another one supplied "for balance" by the Swift Boat
Veterans for Truth in which a stack of rich white people said
they knew for a fact that the arrestee had been sunning himself
in Hawaii at the time and anyway did he have any proof that he
actually possessed a groin? -- and the precinct phone
practically rang itself off the hook as entertainment managers
called offering ever-larger sums for the honour of arresting this
highly talented musician they'd seen on CNN. The arraignment the
next day had been mobbed by journalists in hot pursuit of the
latest rapping sensation, and the judge had obligingly lifted
reporting restrictions. The video of Dwaine giving his testimony
had been played endlessly on MTV, partly because Dwaine's ex-
girlfriend, her knuckles theatrically bandaged, had sought to
distract the judge's attention with a succession of wardrobe
malfunctions, and the testimony itself had shot straight to the
top of the New York Times singles charts, where it had
stayed for a total of six months and seventeen days. "I As Pure
As the Driven Snow, Oops My Lawyer Said that Phrase Was a Fuckin
No-No" had nailed a Grammy, Dwaine had nailed a case-dismissed
verdict, the judge had nailed the ex-girlfriend, and everyone was
happy.
And so Bad Rapper was born.
Except that had required an accident or two along the
way as well -- indeed, Pope Jimbo reflected as the
temperature in his jacuzzi unflaggingly rose, his entire life
could be read as a chapter of accidents. He'd initially wanted to
be called Bad Wabbit, but the manager who'd made him the best
offer over the precinct phone on that bleakly started night had
misheard him, what with the crackly line and the background noise
of suspicious groins being interrogated.
This first megahit -- Pope Jimbo still winced when he
thought the term -- had been followed by a string of others.
The world would have been Bad Rapper's oyster if only he could
have thought of a rhyme for it. Fame. Money (although less of it
than one might think, for reasons his manager had patiently
explained). Women -- hoo, boy, the women. Bad Rapper had
drawn the line at Ann Coulter, but he'd accepted just about every
other female who'd thrown herself at him. He'd given up on
wearing clothes for the best part of a year because all the
dressing and undressing had been giving him friction burns.
And then there had come the invitation to the World Rappers'
Convention in Rome. Bad -- as his friends called him --
had been eager to attend, even though his manager told him
repeatedly that his financial reserves were insufficient to cover
the plane fares. One proposed change of managers later, that
little problem had been solved.
The convention itself had been a bit of a blowout -- how
the hell could Bad Rapper have been expected to read the small
print at the bottom of the flyer, or know there was a Rome in
Peoria, Illinois? -- but luckily a bunch of other rappers had
made the same mistake, and together they'd turned the occasion
into a weeks-long alcohol- and carnality-fuelled party that was
believed by some theorists to have been the direct cause of the
heart attack sustained by a scandalized and elderly Pope. (Jimbo
himself thought it was probably Michelangelo's rendition of Mary
Magdalene, but ever since being told of his own infallibility
he'd tended to keep his lip buttoned about anything he wasn't
100% certain of.)
Partying as he'd been, he'd barely noticed the demise of the
previous papal incumbent. Yes, there'd been a lot of extra
tourists on the streets of Rome. Yes, it was odd that women's
fashions had abruptly lurched in favour of one-piece black
outfits that went all the way from head to toe. Yes, it was
intriguing that Tom Lehrer's "The Vatican Rag" had vanished
overnight from the jukebox of every bar in the city. But Bad
Rapper hadn't put all of these things together, being in
the midst of his creme de menthe phase at the time. He'd
been sufficiently conscious, though, when one of his fellow-
rappers had momentarily peeled him off a couple of lady
gondoliers -- well, that was what it said on their invoice,
anyway -- to register the information that there was a furry
party being held the next Tuesday night.
Renting himself a Barney the Dinosaur outfit from a nearby
theatrical costumier had been easy enough, despite his alcohol
haze -- although Bad Rapper didn't think the costume was an
especially good likeness of Barney, it was brightly coloured and
cheap -- but following the street directions his friend had
scribbled on the back of a paper napkin proved more tricky.
At last, wandering aimlessly through the streets of Rome in
the belief that sooner or later he must surely chance upon the
party venue, Bad Rapper had stumbled upon a procession of people
similarly attired to himself.
His instincts had guided him right after all!
The other party-goers were strangely quiet and solemn, but
he assumed this was just because they were saving their energies
for the fur-clad bacchanalia to come. Depressingly few of them
appeared to be young and female, but who could really tell what
sex or age they were under their costumes? The building into
which the merrymakers trooped was a bit dour, he thought, as
indeed was the large chamber into which they were eventually
ushered, but, hell, who was going to notice any of that when the
massage oil came out?
The preliminary chanting seemed to go on interminably, and
Bad Rapper fell asleep during it. Most of it didn't even rhyme,
and he strained his ears in vain for a single reassuring
"mutherfuckin".
He'd woken up eight hours later to someone throwing cold but
oddly different water on his face. By the time he'd
properly realized what was going on he'd been standing in front
of one of the biggest concert audiences he'd ever faced.
"Shit, these muthafuckas done gone and made me Pope, means
no more pussy, not even a grope," he'd extemporized -- and
the crowd had gone wild.
The artist within him would later decide that he'd been
unwise to carry on improvising in this vein, but at the time,
grinning, he'd been unable to resist the tides of mass adulation
flowing his way.
"Still don't stop the fact that I got the ol' itch, so be
sure to call me if you's a bitch."
The hordes loved that too, but even so the new Pope was
hustled inside before he could vocalize any further divine
revelations, and since then the cardinals had tried to pare his
schedule of public appearances to an absolute minimum.
Yet the force of popular demand could not be resisted, and
they'd had no choice but to trot him out on every occasion. And,
like Pope John Paul II, he'd been a travelling Pope. As Bad
Rapper he'd never quite achieved the status of a world tour. Now
he could have -- and did have -- several of them a year,
and triumphant ones at that, with capacity crowds at every venue.
Worldwide, it wasn't just Catholics who adored the latest
ascendant to Saint Peter's throne. He seemed to put into words
the most profound emotions of their innermost spiritual cores.
His singles had been smash bestsellers before, but now numbers
like "Fuck Me, It's Christmas Again Already" and "I Thought
Fatima Was That Gandhi Dude" moved into a different -- and
stratospheric -- league. MTV was impelled to open up a whole
new channel devoted entirely to his videos. Britney Spears
swiftly divorced herself and made a proposal of marriage before
it was explained to her that "celibate" and "jailbait" were,
like, two totally different concepts. The Grammy
ceremonies each year more and more resembled a full-scale
Popeathon.
And in the Vatican, as global congregations skyrocketed, the
cardinals congratulated each other on the choice they had made
-- or, more accurately, that God had made -- on that
long-ago Tuesday evening when someone had said, "'Course, whoever
draws the short straw and gets picked to be It will have to make
nice with President Bush" and only one person had been left
there, sprawled across two chairs and snoring peacefully, when
the room had cleared.
But the odd thing was that it wasn't just in the matter of
attracting new communicants that Jimbo turned out to be one of
the best Popes the Catholic Church had ever known.
Something had happened to him at the moment he'd been
consecrated in the job, some epiphany of the soul.
Perhaps because of his youth on the mean streets of
Brooklyn, confronting daily the problems of the urban poor rather
than considering them theoretically from some insulated suite in
the Vatican, he'd embarked on a campaign of reform almost from
the moment of taking office.
Enormous donations were given to the relief of poverty and
starvation in the Third World. The radical revision of the
language of the Mass had been one of the hardest things to drive
through, but even the program's initial detractors could not deny
the astonishing success of what was now called the Acid House
Stomp. Reversing centuries of opposition, the Vatican today
thoroughly endorsed contraception, and a healthy proportion of
Church funds was diverted toward the distribution of free
condoms, hereinafter known universally as jimboes. Pope Jimbo's
"Gay Liberation Blessing, This Shit Ain't Even Worth Confessing"
outsold even the latest re-release of Elton John's ode to
Princess Diana. Women were actively recruited for ordination into
the priesthood. Priests were encouraged to marry. Altar boys were
issued with mace canisters. The Pope's admonitory address to the
American television news networks -- "You a Heapa Lyin' Shite
in the Pockets of the Right" -- so shamed the moguls at their
heads that they began to broadcast the truth, thereby leading
promptly to the election of the first non-Bush US President in
generations.
And so the list went on.
The world was a better and a freer place because of the
reign of Pope Jimbo.
No wonder he was revered.
The wonder was that . . .
Well, with clerical celibacy having gone the way of the
dodo, how come the guy at the very top, who could have picked a
different vixen to share his jacuzzi every day of the year, was
lying here alone?
It was that epiphany of the soul he'd had.
Not so many years ago he'd been a starving WalMart employee,
trying to get by on a pauper's wages while getting beaten
shitless every week or two for possibly harbouring thoughts about
joining a union, asking for a raise, or telling anyone about the
way he got locked in every time he worked the night shift. Then,
by accident, he'd become an entertainment superstar . . . but he
hadn't really been happy, despite all the women, song, women,
wine, women, drugs, women, money, and women. So then another
accident had come along, and he'd been made Pope. And now he
really was truly happy, and not just because his
ghostwritten autobiography, God Don't Take "Fuck Off" for No
Answer, spelling out the graphic details of his earlier life,
had instigated the mass boycotts of WalMart -- and not just
because the Vatican had bought the near-bankrupt organization for
a song and turned it into a worldwide workers' cooperative. It
was more because the person who had once been Dwaine Ribble had
at last found a position in life that suited him, one that he
felt he could be genuinely proud of.
And he felt that he owed all this to God.
It seemed only fitting that, by way of return, he should
offer God something he valued above all else.
What God would actually want with Jimbo's sex life
was something Jimbo determinedly didn't think about -- the
same way he determinedly didn't think about whether or not God
was aware of his occasional lapses with the inflatable Julia
Roberts doll he'd ordered online from Amazon.com.
So the one celibate person left in the Catholic Church was
the person at its very head.
Which was fine by Pope Jimbo.
Except when he was in the papal jacuzzi looking up at
Michelangelo's Mary Magdalene.
And particularly except on days when he'd met . . .
No, better not to think about . . .
Her.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-01-10 07:00 pm (UTC)Love, C.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-10 07:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-01-11 12:41 am (UTC)Love, C.
no subject
Date: 2008-01-11 01:58 am (UTC)