Well I didn’t write this. And it’s probably illegal. But I wish I did. And I wish it wasn’t. I’m really just putting it up so when I forget how it goes some place trying to perform it I can easily get at it. For serious. But y’all might enjoy it also.
This is a monologue spoken by the character Jimmy at the end of George F. Walker’s play “Heaven”. The whole play is quite a good read, though I unfortunately have not managed to see it produced anywhere… yet.
So without further ado…
Yeah, thanks. But where was I. Oh yeah. Pain. It’s all about pain. Unbearable soul-sucking pain. And what we do to escape it. But first, speaking of sucking. And this might be related to pain. But anyway when I was a teenager I was busted for possession and somehow I managed to keep my parents from finding out. And I go to court by myself to take whatever enlightened punishment is gonna be doled out to me for the mortal sin of having two reefers in my jean jacket. But because I’m nervous and my cure for that was always to get pretty wasted, I take some mescaline I’ve had stashed away for awhile and I find myself sitting at the back of the courtroom, my mind drifting towards the outskirts of reality. Sweating. Vibrating. And then suddenly a voice from the front announces that some guy’s been charged with sucking on a cannibal’s dick. And immediately a whole bunch of stuff races through my head. First. Why is that a crime. Second. Why wasn’t I told that cannibals were living around here. And also, if this guy really was a cannibal wouldn’t sucking on his dick be kind of a dangerous thing to do. As in, “Thanks for the blowjob. Boy am I ever hungry.” Anyway I’m tormenting myself with all these questions when somehow it gets through the matted fucking mess which is my brain that the guy is actually being charged with marijuana use. And that some uptight narc has been up there describing this horror as “sucking on a cannabis stick.” Okay so I’ve got that straight now. But I’m haunted by my initial response. And the image of a huge black man getting blown by this pimply undergraduate in the defendant’s seat. First why is the guy in my brain black. And second why is he huge. And the only answer I can come up with is… I must be a racist. I begin to cry. In complete and utter shame. I’m an ignorant fucking bigot. Just like my dad and my uncles and just about everyone I’ve ever known. I give up. I’ve tried to be better. But what’s the use. Sure, two of my best friends in school are black and another one is a subversive little genius from Korea. But basically deep in my soul I’m a white supremacist. And I’m gonna have to learn to live with that. I’m given a five hundred dollar fine and told never to do it again. And meanwhile, back at my high school the authorities are busy breaking into my locker to look for the rest of my illicit stash. An illegal action that incenses me to this day. Anyway they don’t find any drugs. Because I don’t keep my fucking drugs in my fucking school locker. What am I a fucking idiot. All they find are two bottles of homemade wine my friend Rocco stole from his father and Molson’s two-four. But apparently that’s reason enough to inform my parents that I’m a serious substance abuser, an I’m placed in “protective counselling” for the rest of my high school years. Which means basically that I was watched. I was watched very closely. But that was okay. Because I was watching myself. I was watching myself for any hint of the incipient Nazism. Any sign at all that not only was I intolerant of minorities but that I actually wanted them eradicated from the face of the earth. And in university I signed up for every black studies course I could find. I took women’s studies. I tried to learn Cantonese. For three years in a row I rode a float in the Gay pride Parade with a lit candle shoved up my ass. People would ask me what it meant. I mean I was surrounded by dozens of naked guys with dildos they were trying to stick in every orifice they could find. And they wanted to know about the candle. “It doesn’t mean anything. I’m just doing what you’re doing!! Trying to get attention!” I sought out summer jobs and part-time jobs that were usually only offered to non-English speaking immigrants. I needed to know I liked these people. That I could live and work with these people … I picked worms. For seven weeks one summer I stood on a street corner with fifty Greek women waiting for a truck to pick us up and drive us to a golf course to pick worms at sundown. Big juicy dew worms good for catching perch and pickerel. We were given miner’s lamps to strap around our heads and tin cans to strap around our legs just above the knee and we worked like dogs picking worms till dawn for piss-poor money the driver basically threw at us while he was depositing us back on the street corner. I worked at bonding with those Greek women even though every single one of them hated my guts from the moment they laid eyes on me because they thought the only reason guy like me would be doing a sad demeaning job like this was for sex. But I didn’t want to fuck them. I wanted to be one of them. Yeah in essence I wanted to be a female Greek immigrant worm-picker and nothing else. But I couldn’t tell them that. I couldn’t tell anyone. Because no one would… understand. So anyway I’m working away integrating myself, my conscious self, and therefore I hope, my unconscious self too, into the entire human family. I leave the Ford assembly line after eight years. I go to law school. I graduate. I do legal aid work for any person of colour I can find. I don’t care if they’re guilty. I don’t care what they’ve done. Or how many times they’ve done it. I try my best to fuck the system and get them off. I think I’m helping. I’m happy. And then just about the best thing that can happen to someone who’s worried that he might be a subconscious Nazi slimeball, happens to me. I fall in love with a Jew. It’s amazing. I am smitten by one of the chosen and my family goes into collective massive cardiac arrest. This makes me positively giddy and when we get married and no one from my family shows up and no one from her family shows I feel nothing except elation. Because they’re the fucking racists and I’m a fucking complete human being. And when I hear what her father thinks of me … words like loser and moron are thrown around freely, I feel great … I mean I guess he didn’t know I’d be a featured act here at the Celestial Improv. Yeah God thinks I’m funny. And the feeling’s mutual. Anyway the more abuse our relatives hurled at us, the better I felt. In fact I’d never felt better in my life. And at work which was now a position on a fancy new Human Rights Commission designed to basically get all the nattering do-gooders off the government’s back. I was the one true light of moral indignation. On behalf of every person of every colour from every corner of the world I stood and pounded out justice. I arranged for all sorts of companies to be fined for failing to implement pay equity and for unjust dismissal often based, they said, on inadequate language skills. And I’d scream “You’re fucking right she has a little trouble with English. Whatya expect. Can you speak Farsi? Not a fucking word I bet. So shut up. And sign her paycheque you racist pig!” And of course many of these employers were racists. And lots of other people whose names came to my attention were racists. Cops. Teachers. 911 operators who patronized or ignored anyone with a Jamaican accent. They were all racists to me. And I was a fucking saint. And the people on whose behalf I worked, the poor, the disenfranchised, they were, well, the inheritors of the earth as far as I was concerned. Except I didn’t know shit about the people on whose behalf I worked. Just like I didn’t know anything about my two black friends in school. Or the Korean genius either. I wasn’t a racist, I’d pretty much settled that in my mind, but I wasn’t anything good either. I was just a guy who … didn’t know shit. Which brings us back to pain. (takes a sip of water) You wanna talk about pain? I’ll give you pain. Okay here we are in blissful eternity, you’re probably thinking, and this guy wants to talk about pain. What’s his problem. Well, okay, but heaven or no heaven you gotta think what happens on earth is kinda worth remembering. And when people suffer, the response to that suffering has to be better than “it’s all gonna be all right in heaven.” Okay you know what? Forget pain. Let’s talk about bullshit. Eternal bullshit. Bullshit in heaven even as it is on earth. Here’s the problem I have with heaven. Who needs it. And also who asked for it. When I was a kid and some priest pit his hand lovingly on my knee and said something like, “Be a good boy and you’ll get to heaven.” All I remember thinking is, “No fucking way.” I’m not going anywhere where you think you’re gonna be too. In fact, everyone I ever heard talking about heaven scared the shit out of me. Or annoyed me so much I wanted to rip their face off … As far as entry into the sweet hereafter being used as an incentive for people to behave better on earth, well what an odious paternalistic idea that is. I mean if you really need incentives why not just get, you know, real. I’m thinking of this cable TV channel that was looking for someone to host a new call-in talk show. Now this is one of those new be-a-better-person channels. You know, they all have names like Life or Discovery, or Vision or some kind of crap like that … Anyway, they call this guy in for an interview. An acerbic, intolerant prick. One of those right wing “I’m doing fine so fuck you” assholes. A guy who thinks all women should stay home with the kids except for his woman who has a great job as an editor for a large magazine. Which really means he thinks only women from the lower classes should stay home with the kids. The disgusting hypocrite. Anyway the say to this guy, “The thing is, we’re one of those be a better person channels so if we give you this job you gotta promise to be … a better person.” So he asks what the salary is. And they tell him. And it’s quite a lot of money. And the guy says “No problem. I was just waiting for an incentive.” … So I’m thinking if God wants people on earth to think and behave in a better was, why doesn’t God just offer them money. That’s real. That’d work. It’d work on a whole bunch of levels. First desperately poor people would have money and stop behaving so fucking … desperately … Next well the better behaviour stuff would have obvious benefits … But most important to me … we’d be able to knock off all that bullshit about redemption and guilt and all that other terrifying superstitious garbage. (shrugs) Talk about painful stuff. (shrugs)
Anyway … (takes a sip of water) My wife got killed. She was carrying our unborn child … That was a drag … (lights start to fade) And yeah … well I’m sorry but that takes me right back to that pain thing. I mean okay I’m … here in heaven but really am I just supposed to forget that happened… I mean talk about insensitive … I mean I guess we’ll take just about any fucking excuse to feel good. (shrugs) Like that helps or something. Like feeling good is the … most important thing … or something. (shrugs)
Blackout.