Over drinks, God told me about His Father and Son relationship with Jesus: “He probably thought I had forsaken him.”
The next time we got together for drinks, God began telling me about his son or rather his non-biological son. To accompany our conversation, I had a Weeping Jesus cocktail, and God had a Bloody Mary — very appropriate drinks!
“To put it mildly, Jesus wasn’t your average kid,” God said.
“Are you going to tell me that he was a cross dresser?” I asked.
“No, but he sometimes wore a tunic with cut out crosses stuck to it. And he had this weird desire to walk on water…even when he was in a bathtub. Several times he almost drowned.”
“How often did the two of you get together?”
“Whenever I came to Nazareth. And when I did, he always asked me to take him to a leprosarium, where he would spend the whole day touching lepers. ‘I’m healing them, dad,’ he’d tell me.”
An image of Jesus running his hands all over the bodies of lepers seemed suggestive, so I asked God if there may have been something sexual about his rampant desire to heal. For example, might he have spent quite a bit of time trying to heal leprous women by touching their breasts?
“Jesus had no more interest in sex than I have in toy poodles!”
Walking past us, the bartender misheard this statement and gave God a Pink Poodle cocktail. Rather than push back the drink, God tried to use his creative powers to turn it into another Bloody Mary, but he only succeeded in turning it into grapefruit juice.
This deed put a downcast look on God’s face, as if he now considered himself a flop. Still, he went on. “I was so busy delivering plagues and smiting folks that I hardly spent any time with Jesus. He probably thought I had forsaken him, but that wasn’t the case at all.”
“So when did you last see him?” I asked. I was quite surprised to hear the answer to this question…
“Just the other day. After he was crucified, he resurrected himself as a divine primary care physician, and he now has a practice on the Upper East Side. I went to his office because I needed a painkiller for my rheumatoid arthritis. I’m getting to be a pretty old celestial being, you know.”
He also must have had some sort of allergy, because all of a sudden he sneezed, after which he exclaimed, “God bless me!” But this was no ordinary sneeze. Such was its potency that it knocked over every glass on the bar and even a few of the bar’s patrons.
“Out!” shouted the bartender at God, pointing to the door.
During one of our earlier get-togethers, my companion was worried about being kicked out of a bar. Would this make him more or less an ordinary mortal? Now it had actually happened, and as the two of us headed onto the street, God’s face was considerably more downcast than when he’d failed to turn a Pink Poodle cocktail into a Bloody Mary.
“Look on the bright side,” I told him. “You may or may not be a Supreme Being, but you certainly are a Supreme Sneezer…”
Upon hearing these words, the look on God’s face immediately changed. I do have some talent, after all, the new expression seemed to say. And as if he wanted to test his potency, he sneezed again.
“God bless me!” he said, and this time he uttered these words far more egotistically than he had before.
Part of a series detailing Lawrence Millman’s experiences with his drinking buddy God. Soon to be gathered together, assuming a publisher is interested, as a mini-memoir entitled “Drinks With God.”
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