Harry and I met in front of the Spiritual Supply shop on 9th Street by 1st Avenue. Harry was wearing a light blue suit and a red and black striped tie. As I approached, Harry took a fake puff on his cigarette, held between two stiff fingers like a victory salute, then drew his hand away to blow imaginary smoke at me. It was only when he gave me the blue Timmerman button that I realized he was wearing one himself. He must have chosen the suit for the button to blend with the material.
Walking to the rally we saw pictures and totem statues of Alexander Timmerman in many of the store windows. A dress store featured a mannequin with Timmerman’s head, including a pretty good copy of his famous headdress, a beaded cap going down over the eyes and nose with multi-coloured beads in the shape of a bird across the forehead, and actual feathers coming down over the nose for the tail. Other than the mask, the dummy wore a sequin-splattered crepe de chine dress which matched the headdress nicely, but would have looked awful on Timmerman’s squat weightlifter’s body. A few doors down, an old bakery run by a mixture of Chinese and Russian immigrants proudly displayed a poppyseed almond cake in the shape of a man spreadeagled (or else doing jumping jacks), which Harry described as “Brother Alex leaping to our rescue”.
As we approached the rally in Miracle Park (full name, Miguel Miracle of the Green Earth Recreational Area, but no one ever calls it that), we could hear loudspeakers blaring Timmerman’s anthem, Touching The Future, with its never-ending refrain, “If not now, when? If not here, where? And if not us, who? If not us, who?” Harry said, “One almost expects to see a chorus line of owls.” Closer to the park, the crowd looked to be about a few hundred people—a mixture of students, yuppies on their lunch break (or out of work), a few drug dealers, some old Eastern Europeans, scattered tourists, and of course, the homeless, whose collective title always makes them sound like a tribe even when they’re not.
Miracle Park was a homeless haven despite all the efforts of the police to exorcise them. In the early morning you could see middle-aged men and women and runaway kids curled up on the benches under the small shell which was supposed to be for bands but never was. I remember once when I couldn’t sleep, going down to the park and seeing two kids with shaved heads and torn shirts which looked like they came from one of those paramilitary academies, like the Latterday Army of the Saints. The kids were holding a pair of thin foam mattresses, rolled up as if they were too precious to stretch them out on the dewy ground, and they were whispering and giggling, with the park lamps lighting up tattoos from homecoming enactments on the top of their heads. I stood there and thought how they weren’t much older than I had been when all that stuff happened. When Paul got taken. And I remember thinking, now here I was, Paul’s age. Except I would get older and Paul would stay the same, forever. I just about ran from the park, with the kids laughing behind me, probably thinking I was some straight who wanted to do an offering of protection against losing her home and finding herself in the tribe.
So there would have been homeless in Miracle Park no matter what. But in fact, Timmerman rallies always drew homeless people, from his first speeches back in New Chicago. Maybe you remember how the police tried to chase them off, and Timmerman shouted at the cops to “let my brothers and sisters touch the living fire of hope.” That line, and the footage of the shabby people reaching up to the stage to touch the Beautiful Ones, the famous still photo of a gnarled diseased hand in a tattered glove reaching up for perfect fingers, these more than anything, were what made Timmerman famous.
Timmerman’s detractors—“professional cynics” he called them—claimed that the blessing of the homeless at his rallies was stage-managed, a fake. They pointed out how few homeless people actually showed up, and implied that Timmerman’s “operatives” spread the word on the street that crowds would not be welcome and the drunks and crazies especially should just stay away. I don’t know. Until I got involved, I didn’t care enough to investigate. Then later, things just got too complicated.
It was true that that day Harry and I didn’t see more than fifty or sixty homeless people in the small crowd. They’d set up a shrine, though, off on the side. Not a bad job. They’d made a frame with pieces of wood and pipe and some crates and cardboard boxes. They’d decorated it with scraps of paper, bird feathers, bottle caps and a couple of rolls of toilet paper draped as streamers. Marker-drawn pictures of Miguel Miracle of the Green Earth (plus a couple of Rebecca Rainbow, for prosperity, and even one of Li Ku Unquenchable Fire, maybe for defiance), some drawn on paper bags or sheets of newspapers, were thumbtacked to the frame. Some had sayings and invocations, in English, Spanish or Russian, written over the eyes and mouth. In the shrine’s centre, on a little wooden platform, stood a sanctified dollhouse. Judging from the broken pieces and the stains, the enactors probably found it on the street. Probably some stockbroker decided to get a fancier model in the hopes of moving up to a townhouse, and had thrown away the spirit aid which had brought him to where he was now. I wondered if a model home kept its certified SDA sanctification if you found it on the street. I wondered if an SDA sanctification meant anything even when you got it right from the store.
The homeless people who’d made the shrine didn’t seem to share my doubts. They’d drawn arrows outside the shrine to the open room in the centre, which they’d filled with representations, some of them actual dolls (a few looked old enough to have survived since childhood) and some just twigs or cardboard cutouts. I imagined the ceremony, maybe late at night, with all the park people chanting together as they marched their proxies from the cold outdoors into the spiritual warmth of the dollhouse. Around the outside of the whole shrine I noticed the blackened dust left over after burning a large amount of flash powder. You never saw that at home when I was growing up. Any time we did a family enactment my mother got out the vacuum cleaner almost before we’d finished the chants and gestures for “sealing the future”. I think that Mom believed that leaving a mess destroyed the power of the enactment.
Amid the ashes in the park I saw small deposits of unburned powder. Probably got wet, I thought, until it occurred to me that maybe they pissed on it. Some people believe that urine around the border of a shrine truly raises it to the level of true ground. Separates it from its entanglement in everyday reality. My mother preferred vacuum cleaners.
Standing there, I remembered something I’d seen once. It was right after Paul’s ascent to guardianship (yes, I know the usual term is “elevation”, but I don’t think that would go too well in this instance). Right after I stopped seeing Alison. I had gotten that feeling I sometimes got those days, that I couldn’t breathe in my parents’ house. It was late at night, and I put on some clothes and rushed outside. Once beyond the door my lungs started to work again, but I hurried away, just in case my father should wake up (I had just read how Malignant Ones sometimes provoked a man’s prostate to compel him to piss in the middle of the night).
So I went for a walk, nervous that the police might spot me and shoo me back. But instead of a cop car trolling the development, I heard a kind of low growl, and when I came around the corner (Stairway-Joining-Heaven-and-Earth Drive) I saw something very strange, even after what had gone on over the past months. Three naked women, their bodies and faces streaked with mud (or maybe shit) were squatting in the road, humming or chanting, and urinating on some kind of white maze they’d drawn on the blacktop. In the centre of the maze lay a doll made of glass and carved crystal. I couldn’t tell the women’s ages. Their bodies looked lumpy, either from muscle or fat. When I first saw them I thought of nothing but, how could they get away with that on the North Shore of Long Island? And then sadness, or maybe shame, took hold of me as I thought of the puny enactments I had done for Paul, never even naked, let alone peeing in the street, and no wonder nothing I’d done had ever worked.