Read Pulphead: Essays for Free Online

guy I brought into the group—we called him Goog—is still a close friend. He leads meetings now and spends part of each year doing pro bono dental work in Cambodia. He’s never asked me when I’m coming back.
    My problem is not that I dream I’m in hell or that Mole is at the window. It isn’t that I feel psychologically harmed. It isn’t even that I feel like a sucker for having bought it all. It’s that I love Jesus Christ.
    “The latchet of whose shoes I am not worthy to unloose.” He was the most beautiful dude. Forget the Epistles, forget all the bullying stuff that came later. Look at what He said. Read the Jefferson Bible. Or better yet, read The Logia of Yeshua , by Guy Davenport and Benjamin Urrutia, an unadorned translation of all the sayings ascribed to Jesus that modern scholars deem authentic. There’s your man. His breakthrough was the aestheticization of weakness. Not in what conquers, not in glory, but in what’s fragile and what suffers—there lies sanity. And salvation. “Let anyone who has power renounce it,” he said. “Your father is compassionate to all, as you should be.” That’s how He talked, to those who knew Him.
    Why should He vex a person? Why is His ghost not friendlier? Why can’t I just be a good child of the Enlightenment and see in His life a sustaining example of what we can be, as a species?
    Once you’ve known Him as a god, it’s hard to find comfort in the man. The sheer sensation of life that comes with a total, all-pervading notion of being—the pulse of consequence one projects onto even the humblest things—the pull of that won’t slacken.
    And one has doubts about one’s doubts.
    *   *   *
     
    “D’ye hear that mountain lion last night?”
    It was dark, and Jake was standing over me, dressed in camouflage. I’d been hunched over on a cooler by the ashes for a number of hours, reading and waiting for the guys to get back from wherever they’d gone. I told him I hadn’t heard anything.
    Bub came up from behind, also in camo. “In the middle of the night,” he said. “It woke me up.”
    Jake said, “It sounded like a baby crying.”
    “Like a little-bitty baby,” Bub said.
    Jake was messing with something at my feet, in the shadows, something that looked alive. Bub dropped a few logs onto the fire and went to the Chevy for matches.
    I sat there trying to see what Jake was doing. “You got that lantern?” he said. It was by my feet; I switched it on.
    He started pulling frogs out of a poke. One after another. They strained in his grip and lashed at the air. “Where’d you get those?” I asked.
    “About half a mile that way,” he said. “It ain’t private property if you’re in the middle of the creek.” Bub laughed his high expressionless laugh.
    “These ain’t too big,” Jake said. “In West Virginia, well, we got ones the size of chickens.”
    Jake started chopping their bodies in half. He’d lean forward and center his weight on the hand that held the knife, to get a clean cut, tossing the legs into a frying pan. Then he’d stab each frog in the brain and flip the upper parts into a separate pile. They kept twitching, of course—their nerves. Some were a little less dead than that. One in particular stared up at me, gulping for air, though his lungs were beside him, in the grass.
    “Could you do that one in the brain again?” I said. Jake spiked it, expertly, and grabbed for the next frog.
    “Why don’t you stab their brains before you take off the legs?” I asked. He smiled. He said I cracked him up.
    Darius, when he got back, made me a cup of hot sassafras tea. “Drink this, it’ll make you feel better,” he told me. I’d never said I felt bad. Jake lightly sautéed the legs in butter and served them to me warm. “Eat this,” he said. The meat was so tender, it all but dissolved on my tongue.
    Pee Wee came back with the Jews, who were forced to tell us a second time that we were damned. (Leviticus 11:12,