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Tuesday, December 15, 2015

I Met God Tonight



Scotto and I are on a budget since we’ve both resigned and are waiting to sell the house, so when we’d arranged to meet some friends in the city for dinner we thought we’d save on cab fares and catch the bus there and back. It seems a bit pedestrian… but what can you do when you don’t have an income?

It all went well on the trip in, but when we left the restaurant at 8:00pm the buses in town travelling to the suburbs were far and few between. A menacing tumbleweed flew past me in the deserted street.

“Let’s go and sit at the bus stop outside the cop station,” I suggested, looking around at the dim lighting and uninhabited streets. “It should be safe there.”

There was a skinny, puny guy with a shaved head, wearing no shoes and patrolling the pavement at the bus stop. He looked fairly harmless, I thought. Slightly psychotic but not in a meat head sort of way. One whack with my handbag if he tried anything funny and he’d be prostrate on the pavement within seconds. My handbag is pretty fudging lethal.

We sat on the bus stop seat and naturally, the weird guy immediately made a beeline for us, goosestepping up and down in front of us, listening to the doof doof on his headphones and staring at us with a glassy, zombie-like expression.

After a few minutes of awkward, blank staring, Scotto smiled at him and said kindly, “Gidday mate. How’s it going?”

The man continued to glare at us in the same unfocussed fashion. He smirked at us and hissed something under his breath as if he was Voldemort on a particularly bad ice trip.

“Are you okay?” I stammered, watching the poor guy’s face twitching in spasms at us and rolling his eyes in a not very gracious fashion.

“Gay!” he shrieked, his cold eyes piercing mine . “I’m not GAY!”

“Nooo,” I replied in hushed, mortified tones. “I said, are you… OKAY?”

“I’m not GAY!” he howled at us. “I’m GA-BRI-EL! The Archangel! I’m GOD!”

Now I know this might sound silly, but for a fleeting second, it crossed my mind that perhaps he was God. I mean it is Christmas time and you know how in the Bible it was always the poorest of the poor and all that stuff. Maybe this was a test… I tried to stop giggling.

“Look!” God shrieked, lifting up his ragged t-shirt. “What’s missing here?”

I was mystified. All I could see was the tattoo of a snake on his cadaverous belly. (Scotto told me later he was looking for a belly button because if he didn't have a bellybutton then he was definitely God.)

“A rib!” shouted Scotto after a few seconds of discomfort.

“Yes!” screamed our new friend. “It’s the missing rib! I’m Adam!”

I could see he had a bit of a dent in one side of his ribcage. Maybe he was God. Who am I to judge?

“Look out behind you!” he suddenly cried out as he cringed in horror. “It’s STEVE!!!!”

Scotto and I both jumped out of our skin in panic and whipped our heads behind us, but there was nothing but the masonry block, brick wall of the cop shop.

“Who’s Steve?” I asked in terror, wondering what the fudging cops were doing right now… having a fudging cup of tea I supposed while we were sitting three metres away about to be murdered.

“STEVE, is my boarding house roommate! He’s the DEVIL! He’s SATAN! Steve follows me everywhere the bastard! ”

“Well, that’s not very nice,” I nodded in sympathy. “What did he do to you?”
“HE TURNS THE AIR CONDITIONING OFF IN OUR ROOM!” Adam/God/Gabriel shouted. "HE'S SATAN!"

“I’m GOD!” he shrieked again, scaring the pigeons in the eaves of the cop shop. “I’m fu#$ing BULLETPROOF! Someone fired a shot gun at me and it didn’t leave a f#@ing mark on me! See these shadows behind me??”

We squinted through fully dilated pupils at the space behind him and nodded in terror.

“They disappear when I turn around because they can’t LOOK ME IN THE FAAAACEEE!”


Then he got a bit carried away after that, "I gave Moses the commandments! I don't care if he dropped them!" he ranted.

It was at that stage, we both started thinking this was turning into the "Life of Brian: Part Two" and I turned to Scotto, “Can we really not afford a fudging taxi fare? I really think we might have a bit of a splurge. What do you reckon?”

And so we did.