From The Cosmic Fly Swatter,
by Cyrus Horatio Pinkerton

Prologue

Now I have no way of knowing the reverend’s real name. It might just be his name after all. That would make things real peculiar I’d say. Let me explain…

Before I was confounded by the words: Thanoma Mabo, I had already been living in Pasadena, California for some months, having moved away from the Bay Area, and all the things I remembered. A “fresh start” is what I had told myself; practicing the best arts of positive thinking that money could buy. I never really changed that much aside from the addition of large doses of humility, which I then manipulated into the false kind, for my own comfort. Where words are many, sin is not absent.

On one particular perfectly good day, while I was doing my best to ruin everything within the reach of my great gifts of irritability, I pulled into a gas station to fill up my truck. That’s when I first met the Reverend. He didn’t look like a reverend to me as he approached. He supplied me with advance olfactory intelligence long before I caught sight of him approaching.

“Excuse me sir, I was wondering if I could have a moment of your time...” he said.

Calling me sir was the first alarm, so I didn’t need more than a millisecond to judge him to be a beggar, and I knew I’d give him some money, but I wanted something in return… Why not? I just got a twenty out of the ATM fifteen minutes earlier so I couldn’t tell him to buzz off. What good is a consciousness, anyway! I thought.

“Listen Amigo, I know what you want, and I’ll give it to you but only if you listen to my version of your story. OK?” I blasted at him.
He smiled at me curiously as I began...

“You see my wife is having a baby, she’s in the car in the lot behind that church over there, and we don’t have any gas… I wouldn’t be asking you but her mom can’t get to her dad’s funeral today cause she has no way to get to it from the chemotherapy center where she lives… They’ve already had to cut back on her treatments because…”

I handed him the twenty. I figured that should do the trick. It would satisfy and surely surprise him, and I would get some relief from the useless-existence morning I was having. I shoved the nozzle back in its cradle. While I screwed on my gas cap, he began to morph right in front of my eyes. It was one of those moments where his words fell in sync with my imagination. My sense of sight was still recording correctly, but it was on standby while my mind enjoyed a more accurate visual rendition of his verbal antics. He was sincere at first…

“Well that’s very kind of you, sir, and my wife and I will surely pray for you… May God Bless you… ”

Then his resolve on this tack trailed off. He started to laugh, which was a relief for a moment. He knew he was selling snake-oil and now he knew I knew.

“That’s pretty good all right! You know… I should pay you for that story!” He chuckled.

By this time I was getting in my truck, and he was still there.

“What’s your name, brother?” He asked.

I’m Daniel Hightower, I told him. His wheels were grinding at high speed just behind those whiskey eyes. I extended my hand to help him compose himself from some apparent burst of epiphany. He took my hand and said...

“You’re not going to believe this, brother, but you truly are my brother.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about and I suspected another scam so I said...

“You mean in Christ?”

“Well, that too it seems…” he laughed, spraying me with used whiskey.

“Look I need a cigarette, so I’ve got to get going.”

“Can I have one?”

As I’m giving him the smoke he tells me his last name is Hightower also. Hey that’s something, I said, trying to get away from any more responsibility with this guy. I began to close the door when he stops it with his hand. He was just looking at me and saying nothing while he stood between me and my open door. Now he was making me nervous.

“Look, I gave you money, what else can I do for you?”

He shook his head at my query not being fully present. I reached into my overhead bins and grabbed a cheap paperback Bible I had stored up there and handed it to him to get his attention. Here, this is for you. I told him. Well that did the trick. He took it. He looked pleased and he backed out of my doorway. As I closed the door to my rig, he nodded to me knowingly, as if we both new something special. He must have meant the Bible, I thought as I drove off and congratulated myself on giving money to the poor drunks of this world and spreading the Gospel to boot.

I didn’t spend much time with this line of thinking though; there was the Bible and how it didn’t relate well to what I knew of myself. I never saw him again… That is until two years later when I found his picture on a web site, as the Reverend Bridger T. Hightower, who would be leading the “World Conference on all the Religions” in New Orleans this fall.
It was he, all right, and he looked good!

But I’m getting ahead of my self here because that day, the day I met my brother, Hightower, was a day I remembered for other reasons. I had for months been trying to find some reason for doing more than I had to, to survive. I had been in one of those motivational transformation groups where you pay money to have them tell you that if you’re not getting what you want out of life you are just plain seeing things wrong. After giving these guys money to attend their classes and making a fool of myself, I was left with the notion that they were nothing more than pseudo-intellectual hygiene factories. There you alternate between hugs of sympathy and challenges to your straying from the approved and acceptable way of seeing things; complete with catch phrases to keep you linguistically focused. It was here that I first became aware of the design all transformational disciplines must follow if they plan on charging money for the service. Yes sir, and don’t ask any of the big questions. Those questions are persona non-gratis, you know… No Vacancies!

After my research to figure out just what I have been looking at for half a century, it wasn’t long before I discovered where these latter day Gnostic Snake-Oilers got their ideas. Seems like a lot of free things are for sale if they are packaged correctly. Cultus Cheerleadicus can be very expensive.

But back to that day, the day I met the Reverend. Yep… I was feeling pretty good about myself after my generosity, and since I had given away a Bible in the process, my mind made a connection to all things religious.

The previous week I had installed a butcher-block counter in a woman friend’s home. While I was cutting and fitting, several of her female friends were having coffee and discussing the news from the day before. Some old man had driven his Buick through an open market killing a bunch of people. They were debating whether he did it on purpose, or lost control in some fit of geriatric incompetence. They asked me what I thought. Never wanting to accept anything anybody was saying, I decided to pose a different possibility. I said to them that maybe being weak and old and frail of mind, some demon took advantage of this and coaxed him into it. Just then, a skinny woman who had been standing up and staring at me starts prophesying. Not the kind where you predict the future but the kind where you start quoting scripture. Everybody was a little surprised including me.

When I was loading up my tools, she let me know that she was French, she was staying with my friend, she was a healer of God and could see that I needed her help. She told me to call her.

So today, being in rare form, I was ready for a healer of God. I had paid admission to a religious experience when I gave twenty dollars and a Bible to the drunk that morning. So I called her and asked her if she wanted to go to lunch and do some healing.

Now I don’t get too embarrassed when folks pray before digging in at a restaurant, but she was way over the top. She not only raised her hands up like a priest, but she was having a personal conversation with God. Her eyes were closed but she was alternating facial expressions of every kind from happy to sad to serious to confused, and all the while she spoke in some unknown language. I kept looking at her not wanting to see what other people were thinking about this weird display.

After lunch we sat outside the restaurant on a partly cloudy day by a flag pole on a concrete bench. She put one hand on my forehead and another on my chest and began her incantations again. Then all of a sudden she opened her eyes and said to me,

“God wants to know what you want!”

I couldn’t think of anything. I was trying to process the question. I looked up at the sky with that flag pole in my view and said,

“Well, I think it would be cool if the Lord made it rain big fat rain drops, just on you and me in this block.”

She asked me if I was speaking in jest or in faith. I replied that it was in faith and that God could do just about anything He wanted to as far as I was concerned.

It took about three seconds before lightening flashed followed by thunder, and then the biggest fattest raindrops I ever saw landed on the khaki shirt and pants I was wearing. Now I started laughing, and she started throwing up her hands at which point I noticed a couple of folks staring at us. I grabbed her hand and dragged her to my car. We hopped in and drove away. She was praying in her own language as we got a little over a block away, and you guessed it, it wasn’t raining.

I took her home to where she was staying. She called me a lot after that and went off the deep end a little with her new found powers. She was eventually evicted from my friend’s house when she threatened God’s wrath on her otherwise benevolent landlord for putting up that pagan idol of a Christmas tree.

Later that day I got a phone call from my lawyer telling me a relative was dead and I had money. That was how this all started. The money gave me time to think, which is a good thing and a bad thing all at the same time. But two years after that day and a lot of books later I hooked up again with the Reverend in my quest to find out the meaning of Thanoma Mabo.

This is the story of Hightower and the Cosmic Fly Swatter. I dedicate this story to the people who have no letters to recommend them, who seek the freedom of being, while turning their weather eye on the good.

For the people who trust in that good found in the foolish things of this world, I give up these words; generated in the pretense-simple, where the most false of all pretenses is to believe that there is any such thing as no pretense.

And for the defense of Christendom, which is not the experiments, expeditions and expediencies of that class of human hypocrites known as Christians. But for the good of what has come from the Providence of God in anything that they have built.

You can, may and will characterize what follows, as you will. As a potential contrary to any view you may take, let me offer, as the author, my characterization of this work:
The Adolescent Apologies of a Part-Time Isolate…
“You know … for kids!”

In hindsight I am glad I had the time to reacquaint myself with the obvious.

With Thanks to: The Living God, for allowing me license for a story that is quite like all science, part Snake Oil and part Truth, and at best can only approach, The More.