Book of Jim: Agnostic Parables and Dick Jokes From Lucifer's Paradise by Adam Spielman Read Free Book Online

“Jim!”  And he knew the voice.  “Cherry!”  And he found Cherry’s head between four tits and a thigh.  The spark in the eyes of the head was Cherry.
    “You’re back in your head!”
    “Your balls.”  Cherry pointed with her eyes and Jim found his balls.  “I kept them warm for you.”
    “You were wearing my balls?”
    Cherry’s head blushed.  The heart in Jim’s own chest, which he carried in the crook of the arm that was like his own, began to flutter.
    “I’m sorry about your party,” Jim said.
    “Are you kidding?  Best Frankenmasque ever.  You should probably go, though.”
    For the wriggling parts of the pale and the beautiful were coming together, and the heads were cursing.
    “Yeah.  Um, I’ll call you then.”
    “Yeah.”
    He ran out of the ballroom in the mansion of the devil, and he carried with him the superfluities of his person.
    7
    Jim reconstructed himself in a guest bathroom, and he was once more Jim from nub to skull.  At the gates outside the mansion he came upon Hemingway and Hunter and Jack and Bunny, who reconstructed their friend.
    When the work was finished, Hemingway said, “You in there, Fitzgerald?”
    Fitzgerald blinked his eyes and shook his head.  “You guys are insane,” he said.  “What did you do to her this time?”
    Hemingway pulled Fitzgerald to his feet.  “Your wife’s a jack-fisted whore.  Tonight we run with the bulls in the clouds and drink martinis until our tongues are dry and we can no longer speak.  Vamonos !”
    And Hemingway and Hunter and Jack and Bunny and Fitzgerald went down the drive.  They climbed into a 1959 Cadillac Eldorado which had metallic blue paint and tailfins .  Hunter took the wheel and Jack rode shotgun  The others took the rear-facing backseat.
    Jim waved.  “Thank you, Mr. Hemingway!  I got my balls back!  And my head!”
    “Looking good, Jim!  Paradise is awesome, but it’s only yours if you fight for it!  So fight for it!”
    “Don’t listen to him,” Fitzgerald said.  “He only fights for lost causes.  He thinks it’s noble.”
    “ Vamonos !”
    Hunter lit a cigarette and the Cadillac peeled away.

 

 
    VI
    1
    So Jim became Jim. He was Jim in his heart, Jim in his head, and he was Jim in his balls.  He was Jim entirely .  He knew his Jimness for twenty-two years, and in those years he also experienced some happiness . 
    These are the brief happinesses of Jim in paradise :
    He stepped up to the home plate at Fenway Park on two bad legs and he called his shot over the green monster.  The slider came low and away and with a war-weary swing he pulled it down the line.  He waved the ball fair and the ball sailed fair and over the monster, and it was a homerun.  He hobbled to first, pumped his fist while rounding second, and he missed third altogether and hobbled back for the legal touch.  Then he planted his feet at home and the big board said, Cubs Win!  The tears of thirty-seven thousand Yankees were collected and fed to the goat who grazed at centerfield.
    He put his eyes on the road and his hands upon the wheel and he rolled out to the great wide open.  He smoked two joints and he kissed the sky.  He listened for the songs that voices never shared.  And when the black hole sun gently wept millions of peaches for the Bally table king, he wondered if he was paranoid or just stoned.  For these were the words of the prophets and other tongues of lilting grace.  And getting no satisfaction from the smoke of the ship on the horizon, he chopped down a mountain with the edge of his hand and said, Quinn the Eskimo was here .
    He pushed his Deuce Coupe to one-forty on a back country road.  The coppers flashed their lights in his dust.  Crates full of jars of moonlight rattled in the backseat.  The road ended where the canyon began, and there were no paths but dead on or capture.  So he leaned out the suicide door and elucidated his convictions  with a Chicago typewriter, raised a jar of