Spiritual American Trash. Greg Bottoms

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СКАЧАТЬ early 1942, everything changed. James was drafted. He knew it was coming as soon as he heard about Pearl Harbor on the night of December 7, 1941, right while he was squeezing the grease out of a pink, sizzling burger. Black man like him, healthy and living in a part of the city white people didn’t even drive through, he knew. But it was okay, too, a part of God’s plan for him. He was a supplicant in the palm of the Father. He was thirty-three now, the same age as Jesus when they nailed him up in sunlight, and he was ready to sacrifice himself if that’s what God wanted.

      From 1942 to 1945, James served in the army’s noncombatant 385th Aviation Squadron in Texas, and later in Seattle, Hawaii, Saipan, and Guam. His unit specialized in carpentry and maintenance, and James made (critics speculate) his first piece of The Throne, a small, winged object ornately decorated with foil, in 1945 on the island of Guam. He returned to Washington, DC, in 1946, after receiving a Bronze Star Medal and an honorable discharge. He rented a room in a boardinghouse not far from his brother’s apartment. Then he found work with the General Services Administration as a janitor, not good work, but better than he would have gotten without that Bronze Star Medal and veteran status.

      After a brief illness, his brother Lee died suddenly in 1948. Maybe he went to work one day feeling a little down, a bad taste in his mouth and sweat breaking out all over him—he hadn’t been to a doctor in years because who could afford a doctor?—then came home, went to sleep, and never opened his eyes. And maybe they buried Lee down in Elloree (this is how I see it) on a bright, sunny Saturday (funeral day), James reading a stitched-together elegy made of Bible passages over the grave, tears rolling down his face, the whole town gathered around, dressed up black as crows, softly singing hymns. But it was a short visit. After mourning and celebrating the ascendant soul of Lee for a day or two, James got on a train and headed back to Washington, sitting in the rear car, the “black” car, the southern countryside smearing by his window. Lee wasn’t simply James’s brother; he was his best friend, maybe his only friend, and now James, alone but not lonely because he knew all things were a part of His plan, began spending all his time envisioning The Throne. Lee and his janitorial job were his only anchors to this world. Now Lee was gone.

      Back in Washington, he went out only to work, find materials for The Throne, and attend a number of different churches in the city (he didn’t believe God would allow for strict denominations and divisiveness concerning His word). By 1949, at the age of forty, he felt the power of God buzzing electrically up his spine. The end-time was coming. He had sensed it during the war, in the stories he heard about what men were capable of doing to one another; he could see it now in the hard faces that hovered along sidewalks, could watch it growing in the people like a malignancy. It was both a curse and a blessing that he sensed it so acutely, felt the world’s decay as a dull ache in his bones.

      Some days now the low, gray sky would fill up his skull like cotton and he’d forget everything but God, forget who and where he was, and it was beautiful, this kind of forgetting, but then he’d come to on the street, walking stiff as always, General Services Administration uniform tight and clean around his small frame, and he suddenly had this clarity; he could see despair like a blanket of living, breathing fog over the streets. It was all he could do not to crumble as he headed to work those days, where he cleaned the floors and toilets of the people who ruled the world.

      4.

      In 1950, answering the request God had made in a dream, he rented an abandoned garage at 1133 N Street NW from a local merchant, telling him he was working on something that required more space than he had. The garage was down an alley, out of sight from passersby, on a block more dangerous even than his own. It was dark and dusty, with brick walls, concrete floor, and light bulbs dangling from wires that traveled along creaky ceiling support beams. Rats scurried in the alley, darting between Dumpsters. Spiderwebs formed misty veils over corners. It was awful. It was perfect. It was exactly where God wanted The Throne to be.

      Over the next fourteen years, James found a routine. He worked until midnight, mopping floors and picking up trash in government buildings, then went to the garage to do his real work for five or six hours, listening closely to what God was telling him, finally going home to sleep when the first pink light of dawn started creeping up the Washington Monument.

      Some afternoons and many weekends, he would visit local used-furniture stores, rubbing his hand across coffee tables, feeling how sturdy the leg of a chair was, staring for long minutes at a rickety old chest, then asking about prices in a voice just above a whisper. If he liked something, he’d return later with a child’s wagon and a pocketful of folded-over dollar bills soft and worn as tissue paper. He carted away things that had the merchants scratching their heads: legless tables, drawerless desks, half-crushed dollhouses, leaning stools.

      Later, you might have seen him walking from a government building with a trash bag full of used light bulbs; or maybe out on the street with a croaker sack, asking bums if he could buy the foil off of their wine bottles. He’d dig through Dumpsters to get green glass, sandwich foil, cardboard. And of course the best thing about working for the American government was how wasteful they were, throwing out perfectly good material because they didn’t like the way it looked. Sometimes he’d even get brand-new stuff because someone ordered twice what was actually needed. It made him smile, these finds. The best thing about cleaning up after the people who ruled the world was that they didn’t see the real value in things.

      5.

      Occasionally, after long hours of work, after a face full of government cleaning chemicals and toxic solvents, his brains felt like Jell-O bumping up against his skull, and bits of time disappeared like old pennies. But other days everything was sharp and sensible. On these days of clarity, James . . . Saint James turned into God’s lightning rod, a cipher for the Word.

      He had grown up with the Bible. Bible was his first language. He could remember his father preaching in Elloree, sweat on his forehead like a field of blisters, people standing around in the backyard testifying. Praise God! He knew the power of God before he had any inkling of Self, knew later that there was no worthy Self without Him. But when he had these days of clarity, of vision, that’s when he knew the world was ignoring God and His commandments, knew the end-time was near. Six million Jews, God’s chosen people, exterminated. He could barely get his head around that one. And in his own neighborhood, a murder every day. Stealing. Lying. Coveting another man’s woman as if it were some kind of game. The list of human cruelties would take you a million lifetimes to recite.

      So Saint James wrote ten new commandments for the world. But he wrote them in his own invented language, a series of loops and cursive-looking shapes that occasionally resembled letters. After his death, among stacks of paper, there were some legible notes found. Among them were these messages: “This is true that the great Moses the giver of the tenth commandment appeared in Washington, DC, April 11, 1931.” “This is true that on October 2, 1946, the great Virgin Mary and the Star of Bethlehem appeared over the nation’s capital.” “This is true that Adam the first man God created appeared in person on January 20, 1949. This was on the day of President Truman’s inauguration.” “This design [The Throne] is proof of the Virgin Mary descending [sic] into Heaven, November 2, 1950. It is also spoken of by Pope Pius XII.”

      He also wrote a new book of Revelation. Like Saint John’s Revelation in the New Testament, recorded in a special language on the Isle of Patmos and scribbled onto parchment at the speed of a fever dream, Saint James’s Revelation was also a kind of stenography from God. On fire with the Spirit when he wrote, he recorded these messages in a spiral notebook. On the cover, in blue U.S. government ink, was written The Book of the 7 Dispensation by St. James. Scholars have deemed the book, like the commandments, illegible. The few English words that appear in it, such as “Revelation” and “Virgin Mary,” are most often in all caps and misspelled.

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