17.

Dinner

Sunday, March 17 - 11:38a.m.

“Not you again.” Mike said when he saw the newspaper reporter, Jennifer, approach his apartment as he was reading on the deck. “I thought I got rid of you. You got your precious article. I jumped through your little hoop. Isn’t that enough?”

She understood why he was acting defensive. She hadn’t been very understanding on her first visit. She had been skeptical for a good reason, but now, scary as the thought was, she was starting to believe his story wasn’t so crazy. Walking on water could be faked, but curing cancer is another matter. She responded softly. “Remember that little girl last night? Sarah McKnight? The cancer is completely gone. You healed her.”

“God healed her.”

“All right, then, God healed her. But you facilitated it.” She said softly.

“Jennifer, let’s not get into this again. I’m not in the mood.”

She reached up and touched him on the cheek then pulled her hand away. “Mike. Don’t you see? I’m not here as a reporter, I’m here because you’ve got a gift. God gave you this gift. I’ve seen it work.”

He thought, Reporters always have ulterior motives. “What do you care?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think. What does matter is that you use your gift. All you ever seem to do is deny it. If God gives you something, you don’t turn your back on it.”

He didn’t care what her opinion was. It was his problem and it was up to him to deal with it. Still, he was willing to listen. “And how do you propose I use it?”

“This morning, I got a call from Steven Fitzgerald, program director for the television show Sightings. He saw my articles about you and he wants to know how to reach you. He wants you to appear on the show. Can I give him your number?”

“I’m not interested in making this into a circus act. I don’t want to be anyone’s guru and I don’t want to recruit disciples. I’m having a hard enough time just coping with it at this point. I think I’d rather just play rock and roll.”

“It doesn’t have to be a circus act. You can have a controlled audience. Maybe do a healing. Maybe share a little of your philosophy. What do you think?”

“And what’s your take?” he asked, still mistrusting her motives.

“Come on, Mike. Can’t you believe that I’m doing this because I care about people? I’m not in this for selfish reasons.” Her voice trailed off as she looked up at him. Her eyes were fixed on his. She was attracted to him. She didn’t understand the attraction, but she felt it. Maybe it was the way he had closed his eyes as he held the little girl with such tenderness. Maybe it was his bad boy rocker exterior, but she knew that behind that image of a long-haired rock singer was a quiet, gentle soul. She thought he might be someone who might understand, someone different from all the rest. “Just think of all the good you could do. What do you think? Wouldn’t it be cool to be on television?” She smiled at him, trying a different approach.

His empathic ability was open and he was surprised by what he felt. She’s attracted to me. She had at first come off as a callous journalist, but now he could tell her professional interest was turning into something more. He didn’t understand why she was attracted to him or why he felt attracted to her. He sensed that she had a lot of depth and a lot of character, and he liked that.

“I’ll think about it.”

“I don’t suppose you’d want to answer some . . . ”

“Don’t even think about the newspaper, Jennifer. You know where I stand on that.”

“Well, how about dinner tonight? We could talk about history or religion or something.” She suddenly felt shy and wondered if she was being too forward.

“Isn’t your boyfriend going to be jealous?”

“I don’t have a boyfriend.”

That surprised him. He wondered if it was because she had unreasonable expectations from a man, expectations that no mortal man could live up to. Maybe it was just a convenient way to avoid love, to keep men out of her life. Did she think that Jesus reincarnated could live up to her expectations? He pondered, What happens when she learns that I’m an ordinary man with ordinary faults and ordinary needs?

Trying to flush out ulterior motives, he asked, “No questions for the newspaper?” He did like the way her tightfitting jeans curved around her hips.

“Nothing for the Sun. Everything’s confidential.”

“You’re on. If you give me your address, I’ll pick you up on my Harley at eight. You don’t have a problem with motorcycles, do you?”

She gave him a boys-will-be-boys smile and she shook her head, then took out her notepad, scrawled her address on a page, tore it off and handed it to him. She started to leave, but then she stopped and turned around. “You said you didn’t want to be anyone’s guru, right?”

“Right.”

“Well . . . what do you want?”

He thought for a moment. “In that other lifetime . . . ” He paused, uncomfortable, “. . . when I was Jesus,” He knew how crazy that sounded. “I had mystical experiences that I remember very vividly. They can only be described as divine union with God. I felt the joy of God’s love burning in every atom of creation. An indescribable feeling of awe, wonder and purpose to life. I just . . . I just want to share that,” he stammered, finding it hard to express what it was he wanted. He was very close to flooding her with a deluge of words. He wanted to say, “I want to make a difference. I want to change the world. I want to tell people who worship the person I was–as a God, no less–that they missed the mark. I want to tell them there is a God, and all our petty bickering and concerns about the world are a useless waste of time. I want to . . . ” but he restrained himself and left it at that. If this budding friendship was real, there would be time to say all those things, and if not, the words would be wasted anyway.

After she left, he wondered again about the attraction he had felt coming from her. Would she still be interested in me if I were just plain, old Mike, with no past-life connections and no rock-star image? Or is she attracted because she thinks I have a connection to God or because I was Jesus in my past-life? Was she Mary Magdalen in her past-life? Two thousand years later and there are still rumors about me and Magdalen. If they only knew . . .

He knew he couldn’t get close to her until he knew her motives. He also knew he could find out all of her motivations, all of her faults, her emotions, her expectations, and who she really was inside; all he had to do was to open up his awareness like he did at the Bellagio. He could see her past, present and future. It was a simple thing for him to do. But was it fair? Wouldn’t it be an invasion of her privacy, an abuse of his power? It was a double-edged sword. He could find out her innermost secrets, but in so doing, he would be violating her trust, and that didn’t seem right.

He decided to maintain her privacy and not to probe her innermost secrets. Having made that decision, he fantasized for a moment the idea of having a relationship with her. Where would that take him? There were a lot of complications, he knew. Take sex for example. Priests abstained from marriage and sex so they can devote their lives to God. He wondered, shouldn’t he abstain too? Shouldn’t he devote his life to God? If he got involved with a woman, wouldn’t it distract him from his mission? Besides, how would it look in the eyes of God or the people who needed to hear his message? Was it a sin? He couldn’t believe it was a sin. It was getting way too complex for him to handle. He tabled that thought and went back to reading his book on Gnosticism.

Sunday, March 17 - 8:00p.m.

Mike tooled up to Jennifer’s apartment on his Harley. He drew out the kick-stand with his left foot to park the bike, but before he dismounted, Jennifer came out of the apartment, having heard the roar of the tail-pipes. He handed her a helmet and off they went into the glitz of Las Vegas at night.

Mike didn’t feel the need to impress Jennifer, so he turned off the strip, to a little Italian restaurant he had always liked. Tonight, he didn’t want to be seen as the Messiah or a “rock star.” He just wanted to be Mike. He hoped that she would see beyond all the other issues, because right now what he needed most was someone to talk to. In their previous conversations, she had made him feel comfortable in spite of their little spat, unlike other women he had known. He was at ease talking with her. He hoped by the end of the evening she would feel the same way.

Jennifer broke the ice by saying, “Tell me about the Original Artists. How did you become a rock singer?”

“It’s a long story. Actually, I can thank my dad for who I am today.”

“So your dad was a positive role model?”

Mike gave a sarcastic laugh. He had nothing but disdain for his dad. “Just the opposite. He was a prime example of who not to be. He was an alcoholic and a manic-depressive who hated people. He was prejudiced and unsocial. He killed himself when I was ten and my mom hated him for not being there for us kids. It just goes to show you how adversity can be a catalyst for growth.”

Jennifer squirmed in her chair. The mention of suicide made her very uncomfortable. There were times, especially when she was a teenager, when she had wanted very much to commit suicide. She tried to push those suffocating thoughts from her head, just in case Mike could somehow read her thoughts and feel the turmoil inside her. She forced herself to stop fidgeting so her body language wouldn’t betray her feelings. “How awful.”

“I always felt like my dad’s suicide was somehow my fault, so I carried around this guilt. I always felt like I was never good enough to meet up with anyone’s expectations so I didn’t try. Anyway, without any positive male role models in my life, I hung around with the wrong crowd: the smokers, the troublemakers, the rock-and-rollers,” he said rolling his eyes like that was a fate worse than death. He wondered what she was thinking: surely Christ reincarnated would have a spotless record. But damn it, he thought, I don’t have to live up to your expectations. I won’t fall into that trap again. He tried to tell himself that it didn’t matter what she or anyone else thought about him. He couldn’t change his past any more than he could change who he was.

She liked the fact that he was showing a little humanness. She wasn’t sure she wanted to pull the conversation back to Christ, but clearly Mike identified with him. She quietly said, “They say Christ didn’t hang around with the Pharisees either. He hung around with sinners.”

“True,” he said with a smile, remembering the past. “Anyway, my mother saw me hanging around with the wrong kind of kids, so she tried to straighten me out. Well, they weren’t really bad kids, in retrospect, they were just like me. They didn’t have strong, supportive, loving guidance from their families. They were just kids, trying to figure out how to survive in the world and fighting the system every step of the way.”

“Anyway, it may have been her last hope, but after a year of trying to keep me in line, my mom enrolled me in the church choir about a year after my dad died. She had always been a pretty steady churchgoer, but my dad had forbidden her to take us. He was a Russian Orthodox Jew. He always said we should be able to make up our own minds when we were old enough. Anyway, with everything she had been through, and seeing me heading the wrong direction, it was off to church choir I went. You should have seen the fight we had about that one,” he laughed, remembering the scene he had made. “I’d like to think that my mom knew that music was what I needed, but my guess is that what she really liked about the choir was the fact that it kept me out of trouble twice a week during practice and all morning on Sunday.”

“I remember the choir director was not too happy about me joining, either. Here I was, this long-haired rebel kid being dragged into his office. It came as a surprise to everyone when they found out that I could actually sing. Later, I joined the high school choir and got some formal training. Of course, I didn’t want to sing in a choir, I wanted to be in a rock band, so that’s exactly what I did. I started singing with a couple small garage bands in Phoenix when I was in highschool. Mostly we just played at our friend’s parties. After I graduated, we started doing weddings and stuff like that.”

“When I got tired of that scene, I moved to Las Vegas. That was three years ago. I hooked up with a couple guys here–Steve and Karl–and we started playing together. The idea of the band was to promote Love, kinda like the Beatles did.”

“Do you realize how much the Beatles sang about love? ‘She Loves You,’ ‘Hey Jude,’ ‘All You Need Is Love.’ That was my personal philosophy even before I remembered my past-life. I think that love is the most important thing in the world. It sounds kinda corny, I know, but there’s truth in it. Anyway, I vowed to be better than my dad. I vowed to leave this world a better place than when I entered it. I wanted to change the world.” He smiled at her with those piercing blue eyes, a slightly starry-eyed smile.

She pursed her lips in an amused smile. Is he flirting with me? “So what’s your favorite Beatles song?”

“It was on Abbey Road. A song called ‘The End.’ I love the words: ‘And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.’ At the time, people thought it was a blatant reference to sex, but Lennon and McCartney insisted it wasn’t.”

Jennifer sat and listened to him quietly and tried to take it all in. She thought the whole concept of love as an ideal was romantic, especially coming from Mike. She could no longer deny she found him very attractive. However, as a reporter, she had to take a step back and play the reporter’s role of the skeptic. “Romantic, I’ll admit. But what if it’s all just youthful idealism?”

He became defensive and wondered if she thought he was just feeding her a line. “Are you questioning my motives, Jennifer?”

“Not your conscious motives,” she said quickly, trying to keep the conversation comfortable. “They seem genuine enough. But what about your unconscious motives? You’re young. People our age always have a positive, optimistic outlook on life. A lot of college kids go through a time when they believe in the powers of love and peace. They fight against injustice, join the Libertarian Party and demonstrate against ‘the system’ because in their eyes, the problems of this world are always the system’s fault. And the solution is always love. Love has a nice ring to it, but these same college students are also fighting against raging hormones, experimenting with sex and relationships, struggling to find their place in the world, and tormented by their newly awakened desires and lusts. Give them twenty years in the ‘real world’ and their ideals change. Yesterday’s hippies are today’s corporate businessmen who wear two-thousand dollar business suits. Eventually they stop fighting the system and join it.”

“I’m not a college kid. Besides, don’t you think that the system is partly to blame, Jennifer?” Mike said, calming down. “After all, look at our values. Look at what we’re taught in school. I used to get into big fights with my mom about my grades because I just didn’t see the point. What little so-called formal education we get doesn’t teach the important things in life: loving relationships, respecting each other and fighting fair, caring, nurturing, courtesy, or dealing with your emotions. Their idea of sex education is making the kids learn the names for body parts. Hell, we are so afraid of crossing the line between the ‘separation of church and state’ we can't even talk about spirituality. The only way we learn these things is by observing our own parents’ dysfunctional marriages. No wonder we screw up our relationships. No wonder we’re so concerned with ‘self.’ No wonder the divorce rate is so high. No wonder we become cynical when we reach our mid-forties.”

He continued. “Our society doesn’t even value human life as much as it does professional sports. The television is filled with millionaire sports-jock celebrities, and when they whine we coddle them; we build them new half-billion-dollar stadiums. Meanwhile, millions of people are starving to death around the world.”

He was on a tirade now and she wasn’t about to interrupt him. “People today are so materialistic, they get caught in an endless trap. Today’s parents don’t have any time for their kids because they have to work two jobs just to make the payments on their ten-thousand dollar boats and overloaded credit cards. Meanwhile, the kids are basically ignored and they’re expected to learn how to live from the public schools, but the schools don’t teach what’s important. Hell, they don’t even teach you to balance a goddam check book, let alone how to deal with other people. The schools aren’t even given enough resources to teach what they want to teach. So what do the kids learn? That only Self with a capital ‘S’ matters. That, and acquiring more toys. To me, it seems like I’m the only one who sees a problem here, and you’re trying to call it naivety.”

She understood what he was saying. “I’m not trying to say that you’re naive, Mike. Bear in mind that I’m a reporter. I can see the difference in attitude between a thirty-year-old man and a fifty-year-old man. Attitudes change. People harden. Don’t you think that maybe you’re just going through that phase of young idealism? How old are you anyway?”

“Thirty-three.” After he said it, the realization hit him: He had been thirty-three when Jesus had been crucified and he wondered if it had some kind of cosmic significance. Maybe when he was Christ he had come to the Earth prematurely, and the people of the Earth weren’t ready to hear his message, so they killed him. Maybe he had decided, “Let’s give it a couple thousand years to mature, then I’ll go back and finish what I started.” His eyes grew wide and his mouth opened with sudden realization. If only he could remember what he was supposed to do next.

Jennifer saw the expression on his face and asked, “Mike, what is it?”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, Mike,” she prodded. “Don’t clam up on me now. What is it?”

“I just realized that I was thirty-three years old when I was crucified as Christ,” he said shaking his head, trying to put the pieces together. “Maybe God arranged to have me–I mean Jesus–crucified before he lost his youthful idealism because that’s what the world needed. I suppose I am an idealist, but maybe that’s what the world needs most is youthful idealism. Or maybe I’m supposed to inspire that attitude in people who have lost it.”

“So if you’re such an idealist and you hold love with such reverence, why don’t you have a girlfriend? You don’t have a girlfriend, do you? You must have plenty of opportunities. I saw lots of interested girls at the show. As a rock singer, you can’t tell me girls don’t throw themselves at you.” For an uncomfortable instant, she felt like she was prying just a little too much. She offered him a way out. “Or is it because in your past-life as Jesus, you weren’t focused on romantic love as much as platonic love, spiritual love and love of God?”

He looked at her and wondered, Is she trying to hurt me in some way? Maybe expose my humanness? Or is it my own defensiveness? He sure wished he knew her motivations. Pushing men away again, perhaps? “Boy, you reporters don’t mince words, do you? It’s not that I don’t want a relationship, Jennifer. I do. Maybe I’m just a little gun-shy. I’ve had more than a few botched attempts.”

“So you’ve had girlfriends, but it hasn’t worked out.” She couldn’t resist. “Tell me more.”

He wasn’t going to bore her with the details of his failures at love. Not unless she bared her own soul, and he didn’t think she would. There was too much reporter in her. “I’ll tell you about it, but this can’t be one-sided, Jennifer. Are you going to tell me about your failed love life? After all, you’re alone too.”

She got tense, then relaxed and told herself she wouldn’t have to bare her soul. She wouldn’t have to tell him her secret. She could pacify him with some cute lines. “Sure. You tell me your innermost secrets and I’ll tell you mine.”

“Alright, then. Get out the violins. There have been more than a few failures, but I’ll just give you the highlights, okay? There was this girl named Kelly who I had a major crush on in college.”

“You went to college?”

“Only two years. My mother wanted me to become a doctor or a lawyer or an accountant or some other nonsense. She used to say, ‘Why don’t you do something with your life?’ I didn’t want to be a pencil-neck geek. I was more into the performing arts. I took music theory, vocal training, that kind of thing. Remember all I wanted was to be a rock singer. College just wasn’t my scene, so I dropped out after I started singing with a garage band called Vision. I tried to stick it out but that didn’t last long.”

“I’d love to hear more about Vision, but weren’t you talking about Kelly?” Jennifer pushed.

“Yes. Anyway, in my freshman year at Arizona State, I met a girl named Kelly and became infatuated with her. Head over heels; she was all I could think about. The problem was, I was too embarrassed by my own feelings to even speak to her.”

“You? Shy? Yeah, right,” she said cynically.

“It’s true. I was young and naive until I dropped out of college and started singing rock and roll. I was kinda this shy choirboy back then. It took me a whole semester to muster the courage to talk to Kelly. When I finally got up the nerve, she was ruthless and told me in no uncertain terms to take a hike. I was devastated. I guess maybe she helped make me a tougher person. After facing that much pain, I decided I could face anything this world had to offer. I learned. I grew. Life goes on.”

Jennifer became a little uneasy when she thought he was done talking. Soon it would be her turn. She was starting to wonder if she could pacify him with a line. She was relieved when he kept talking.

“About a year later, there was another one-sided relationship, but the roles were reversed. When a good friend of mine named Gina fell in love with me. I found her attractive, but somehow I knew in my heart that she was not ‘the one.’ I just didn’t have romantic feelings for her. One night, Gina tried to throw herself at me, and I had to tell her ‘no.’ The problem was, the more I said no, the more obsessed she got. Finally, I had to end our friendship on a very unhappy note. She became hysterical and screamed and cried. I was worried that she would commit suicide like my dad. It was the whole guilt-thing again. But I also knew that if I tried to help her, it would only feed her obsession. The only way to help her was to cut off all ties with her.”

“What did you do?”

“The only thing I could do. I cut her off. I broke her heart, just as much as Kelly had done to me earlier. I never forgave myself for the pain I caused her. Telling Gina to go away was the hardest thing I ever needed to do, and for years, I was convinced that I was a bad person because of it.” He looked down, remembering his pain and her pain. “Anyway, that’s my story.”

He spoke like a wounded child and she wondered if he was being brave to be that open and honest, or just very fragile. She had never met a straight man who would be honest with his feelings before and she admired his candor. Most men bottled things up, but not Mike.

But maybe it was something more. Maybe he liked her, and could somehow sense that she would understand when no one else ever had. She saw the way he looked at her, and she didn’t have to be psychic to recognize desire, as much as he tried to hide it from her.

They had a long, comfortable discussion about life, philosophy and music. She tried to keep him talking as much as possible so she wouldn’t have to open up to him. By the end of the evening, she had enjoyed herself so much that she agreed to come to his apartment the next night for dinner, but she still had that feeling of dread that she associated with her teen years.

Excerpt from The Gospel According to Mike

He said, “What goes around, comes around. Some people think Karma is a silly idea from the East, but did I not say that you reap whatever you sow? Plant the seeds of goodness wherever you go.”