God’s Day

I used to pray a lot. I don’t much anymore. It’s not that I don’t believe in prayer. It’s just that I don’t know what to say. Asking God to bless my mother and father and all my cou-sins and next-door neighbors and the spotted owl over all his other creations seems more like an Incantation of Myself than any sort of heartfelt communication with the one who invented avocados and time.

And there was one night when I was walking to the liquor store in a blizzard, and it seemed I heard the babbling prayers of all mankind, the blizzard of oh Lord, oh gimme, oh fix me, oh help me, oh ease my busted heart and let me sleep with a long-legged Finnish girl, but it turned out it was all my own voice, which sounded the more pathetic in its yearning chorus.

Over the years I’ve developed a dubious idea of what it might be like to be on the other end of all that begging, groveling, and petty bargaining. Having a faint intuition of why God may have put up the Gone Fishin’ sign, I’ve gotten off my knees and whittled my daily petition down to a more sensible and honest “Thank you, God. I know I’m a fool.”

Still, there is just one day in the year when I go plumb God happy. It’s a made-up day pulled randomly from the calendar, as far away from the retail conspirators and their chocolate bun-nies and sawed-off pine trees as I can get; a twenty-four-hour period of gratitude, humility, and atonement, a bumbling ama-teur votive Mass I call God’s Day.

On God’s Day, from midnight to midnight, I do not eat, speak, work, smoke, read, enjoy electronic media, or accept visi-tors. I contemplate, and I pray. The praying is not formal; it is more conversational, something along the lines of “I hope I’m of some pleasure to you, God. I hope that I’m not getting this completely wrong. I hope I’m not an asshole. I feel terrible about that bucktoothed kid I beat up in sixth grade. And no, of course I shouldn’t have slept with her, or her, or especially her.” I avoid the syrupy, Goody Two Shoes approach that I suspect has put the Old Man into diabetic coma. If you’re the Divine Ground, the Ultimate Reality, the Truth and the Way, no amount of sugar-coating or verbs ending in –th are going to mitigate the facts.

Upon the advent of my holy day, besides my fasting and ta-cit contemplations, I give up something important, a token sacrifice. Once, I destroyed a good story in progress. Another time I gave up watching the Michigan-Ohio State game. I always throw money away on God’s Day, walk with a twenty into the dark-ness and leave it somewhere. Though this practice is to demon-strate a detachment from worldly things, the last few years I have begun to get a childlike satisfaction from the thought of someone needy or deserving finding the money.

Once, for example, I put a twenty in the pages of a library copy of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Several times I have dropped the money over the fence of a house in disrepair. Another time I slipped the cash into the slats of a bench in a park inhabited largely by winos.

One year I walked only a block from my motel room to the cemetery-monument company across the street. It was early November, cold wind blowing sandy snow. Around the back of the monument company was a stack of tombstones, rejects perhaps, misspelled, unpaid for, or abandoned by the contractor in a sudden change of mortal sentiment. There was one for a staff sergeant Vernon Frederick Brack, who died on my birthday in 1996. Another simply read: DWINNELL. Another large stone featured the names and birth dates of a married couple, only the wife’s death date inscribed.

The heap of headstones guarded a path through the weeds that traversed the railroad tracks. And it was here where people like me—people without cars—would walk across the tracks to get to the store or to work. Unless a train derailed here, no one else but the poor would have a chance at finding my devotion. My real hope was that the Dirty Man, who walked all day, never spoke, bathed, or looked anyone in the eye, would find it. I had seen him in every part of town: walking the railroad tracks and even the old highway; on a bench by the grocery store, eating out of a discarded pizza box; or simply standing in an aisle, hands at his sides, fingers curled, staring upward, stinking and dazed, the customers flowing warily around him.

Most people did not want to admit that with an unexpected turn of fortune—a low draft number, a renegade gene, a bad marriage—they might’ve been the Dirty Man too. But I knew how close I’d come, how close I might yet be. I was, in a manner of speaking, going nowhere myself, getting older, still alone, and not making much progress toward my lofty goals. I had already suffered one major breakdown just two years before. I was well acquainted with the crack of Fate’s cudgel, the look on his goofy sadistic face, his missing incisor and sneaky laugh. And every time I saw the Dirty Man trudging toward me, his neck collared in black skin that had once been white, shattered soul turning in his shipwrecked eyes, I felt a shiver of recognition, a vision of Christmas future.

Once I tried to give him money. It almost felt like a bribe. But too proud—or too confused—he did not acknowledge me. My recent breakdown had given me keen vision into the frail psy-chic condition of all sentient things, a kind of bleeding affection for anyone immersed in the cruel playground of earthly exist-ence, even professional bass fishermen and Joyce Carol Oates. But privately I could not think of the Dirty Man in any other light than lost and gone forever, dreadful sorry, Dirty Man.

I lifted the top stone in a stack of markers and slipped in the corner of the bank note, which flapped vigorously in the breeze and met all my standards of high visibility. Satisfied, I re-turned home to finish my day of worship.

Though this is a hair-shirt holiday and not a turkey, gravy, and Detroit Lions one, I have never been in any danger of being swept up into ecstasy. I empty my mind of earthworms and onion rings, of gossip, news, 62 percent of sex, and up to 42 per-cent of daydreams, but no pictures of God have ever replaced them. I have never had a prophecy or a revelation on this day. I am never steeped in mania or visions. I have never spoken in tongues or burst out in Mahalia Jackson with full gospel choir behind me. No trace of stigmata or image of Christ’s face on a cocktail nap-kin has ever appeared. I do not become charismatic. I just feel good for a while, cleansed, my accounts squared, at one (see atone), and I try to linger at the edge of this crumbling precipice before I am sucked back down into the sludgy swirl of El Mundo.

For my midnight breakfast I had a big dish of chicken cacciatore, two chocolate brownies, and a Coca-Cola. I sat by the window of my motel room and smoked a cigarette and watched the snow fly past the glass. From the radio I learned that I had won all three of my football bets. The money I throw away always seems to come back to me like this: “Cast your bread upon the waters,” the Good Book says, “for thou shalt find it after many days,” though this has nothing to do with the purpose of the day.

At 1 a.m. I went to bed, listening to the soft hiss and tick of the granular snowflakes on the window. Even though I have ex-pended little physical energy, I never have trouble sleeping after God’s Day.

The next morning it was still snowing, the same hissing, dry, crystalline flakes blowing straight-as-a-bullet sideways. I need-ed some groceries, so I walked the railroad tracks to the store. The twenty was still flapping in the breeze between the tomb-stones. Daylight had just risen. There was not yet a great deal of traffic through the frozen weeds beside the tracks, but some trailer and motel dwellers would be along shortly for the first shift at their cement-factory and tech-support jobs. I figured the bill would be gone by the time I returned from the store.

But an hour later the bill was still there. What is wrong with these people? I thought. I have been robbed twice, had bicycles and stereos stolen out from under me, there are more people who owe me money than I can count; and here I am GIVING it away, and there are no takers. I almost talked myself into reclaiming it. I could’ve used it. I lived on four hundred a month. It wasn’t my fault that no one had picked the money up. My intentions had been good. But I knew I would feel wrong. The money was no longer mine.

The next day was sunny, still cold, and I had to go check the money. Still there, bold and flagrant as a whore waving a hand-kerchief at a train. My neighbor hadn’t gotten his government check yet and claimed to have seventeen dollars to get him through the week. I thought of telling him, “Just go to the store, man. Walk to the store. Trust me.” But that would’ve been too obvious, too much like a silly treasure hunt. Besides, the govern-ment was taking care of him. He’d be all right. You can’t force these things. The one who needs it must find it on his own.

The bill flapped unmolested between the tombstones for three days, snow piling up all around it like sand. I couldn’t understand why no one could see it. Then it occurred to me that maybe people were superstitious about fooling with tomb¬stones, or maybe it was too easy, hidden in a place so conspicuous no one would ever find it.

On the fourth day it began to snow again, heavily, and I decided to relocate the bill. If it got buried, it might be lost for-ever, a fruitless sacrifice, of benefit to no one. I was missing the point of the exercise but I was stuck on the completion of my UNICEF ideal. I lifted the stone marked DWINNELL, removed the bill, shook off the snow, and stowed it away in my left pocket, the nonspending pocket.

For several days I walked around nervous and incomplete, the soggy bill in my pocket accumulating moral weight, like something stolen or unreturned. I looked for needy children. I looked for the Dirty Man. He had always ignored me as he passed, slogging along in his cloud of eau de homelessness, but I figured I could slip the money into his jacket pocket somehow. He could buy a pizza or a package of Bugler or toss it down a sewer grate like a candy wrapper—whatever he did, it would be off my hands. My conscience would be eased. But he was nowhere to be found.

At Wal-Mart the next day a child was distressed that he could not get a toy, and I thought about secretly handing him the money. But how holy is the palliation of a spoiled child? I tried to think of worthy charities where twenty dollars didn’t represent one one-hundredth of one percent of the CEO’s annual salary. It’s harder than you might think in small-town America to casually run across people in need. I walked around with increasing consternation and gloom.

My sacred day was stretching out into an eternity of worldly snags. I was ready to throw the money into the gutter or tear it up like confetti or leave it blowing across the snowy grounds of the graveyard, when I passed the Immaculate Heart of Mary Church.

Although I was aware there had been an evil pope in the fourteenth century, and Catholic ritualism often rivaled many American sporting events, I also knew that Catholic charities did good work. Every person I’d ever met who’d gone to a parochial school for any length of time had a better education than I had, and deeply inculcated guilt and a well-illustrated idea of hell usually make for more interesting and intelligent company than the average Joe with a healthy sex life and oodles of self-esteem.

Two older women were entering the church. I thought they must be very religious to be attending services on a weekday evening.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” I said to the one bringing up the rear. She was a bent, small woman of perhaps seventy-five years. “Are you a member of this church?”

She looked up at me, her eyes so peaceful and blue I knew I had come to the right place.

“Yes, I am,” she said.

I handed her the twenty. “Could you give this to the church? Put it in the collection plate or something.”

She accepted the money without question or even curi-osity, as if this were an everyday occurrence, as if she had been expecting me.

“I’ll put it in the box by the Virgin Mother,” she said.

“Thank you,” I said.

She said thank you too, so radiant with peace and self-assurance I almost wanted to follow her in, become a Catholic too, except for that evil pope in the fourteenth century.

I was ready to feel good now, to go home and drink a glass of sacramental wine. But then here came the Dirty Man, plod-ding along in his mindless fugue, dressed in grimy khakis and tan leather jacket and split black brogues, the stump of a hand-rolled Bugler burning in his fingers. I slowed my pace and braced my heart. Soot-speckled snow was packed in the gutters. The sun was almost down, the sky a hazy golden pink. The rough smell of cattle in the air mingled with the stench of the Dirty Man. As he passed, he raised his head and wrung from his leather face a smile that seemed troubled and shy. “Hello,” he said.

I was shaken. “Hello,” I returned.

I had more to say—“What’s your name?” perhaps, and, “Can I buy you a pizza?”—but he was gone.

Who knows what form will spin next from this glittering snarl of dragons and clowns we call our soul? Perhaps this time next year I will be the one walking the tracks or lifting a slice of trash-can pizza to my insane lips, while he, on good meds and cleaned up in a pressed, striped shirt, casts about for a clever way to dispose of a twenty-dollar bill. In the meantime, feeling once more the pull of the earth, I promised myself two glasses of wine that night in my warm little room, maybe even three, and then I waved to no one in particular and headed out, muttering at the sky: “Thank you, God. I know I’m a fool.”