Jesus in New York

Ok, we are well off course, but I want to keep up with the posting. So here is the brief beginning of a short story I'm writing. Feel free to leave a comment. I know it's short. It's just the beginning. I also realize that I'm Jewish and this little story features Jesus. All I can say is... I found it amusing. Hope I don't offend anyone, but if I do... shit happens. Enjoy.

Jesus Christ was sitting in a Starbucks in New York when he decided he might like to stir things up again. It's true that this was an often occurrence for Jesus. Every fifty or so years he would become gloomy and nostalgic for the old days and go on a localized bender of healings and miracles before an angel showed up and calmed him down.

He was ahead of schedule, and if one didn't know him better they might think this was unusual. However, unusual was the norm for Jesus, he liked to keep things lively.

The last time he had revealed himself to the world, all be it, just a small part of the world, was in the 1980's during the run of Oh God. The movie stared George Burns as a rumpled God who liked fishing and watered down country music. Though he had liked George Burns in his early radio and television shows, Jesus knew that his portrayal of god had fallen far short of the mark. How do you play a being that enjoys spending millennia in the form of a giant spiraling cloud of dust anyway? Maybe George Lucas could make a passable go at it, but not Carl Riener.

Jesus liked the idea of God revealing himself to a prophet, something he hadn't done in a while, and had never done as often as some stories claimed. So Jesus spent the last part of the 20th century going from person to person, country to country, choosing folks more or less at random, wowing them with some simple tricks, and sending them on either missions of peace or vengeance, depending on the local situation.

No one in heaven who was assigned to control this kind of thing did anything, even after some British tabloids reported on the increase of modern prophets. It wasn't until one of the recent disciples wound up being satirized on SNL's Weekend Update, that heaven decided it was time to pull the plug.

In that particular case, the Jesus situation as it was known, the angel assigned to go to Earth and put the kibosh on Jesus' activities was a former human being named Russell Fein. Fein had been a British expatriate who died on the New Jersey turnpike in 1973, when a junkie in a pickup truck smashed his 1969 Volkswagen Rabbit, a sure way to enter heaven in good graces. It was believed that Russell and Jesus might hit it off, both having been relatively friendly guys when alive, though both suffered severe bouts of depression that came on quickly and lingered for weeks. In addition, both Russell and Jesus had suffered for hours before dying young, both were guy guys, boisterous with their pals but extremely shy around women, and both were the products of over-protective Jewish mothers.

It was a conversation between the women behind the counter and a customer that set Jesus off. Jesus was like that. One moment quietly sipping an Espresso Macchiato with chocolate and whipped cream, thinking about nothing more then the pleasant hum of a pair of flies on the empty table next to him, the next planning a biblical firestorm in midtown Manhattan.

Russell walked over to the table and before sitting down called out, "Jesus Christ, is that you?" loud enough for the dozen or so people inside the coffee shop to hear.

Russell sat down with Jesus and asked him, "do you hate me Jesus?"

"Of course not, I don't hate anyone." So sayath Jesus Christ.

"What about the Romans" Russell asks

"Oh those bastards I hate" responded Jesus, "but I don't hold a grudge. That's not my style."