I Was Bitten By a Radioactive Jesus

I’m not Jesus, nor do I think I am. That would be delusional. And blasphemous, too, for whatever that’s worth. See, this is the thing that people don’t get. I am by no means claiming that I am Jesus; I was bitten by a radioactive Jesus, giving me super Jesus powers. It’s an entirely different thing. Is that so hard to understand? It certainly was for the people at that place I hate to dignify with the name “hospital,” but Psychiatrists are often, surprisingly enough, not the sharpest tools in the shed.

Here’s how it happened. It could have happened to anyone, really, and probably should have happened to a dedicated Christian of some kind, but it didn’t. It happened to me. I was driving across Ohio in my new car. Well, it was hardly new, but it was new to me. It was a 1970 Pontiac LeMans Sport, pretty close to my own age, which I had hoped would build a natural rapport between us. My brother Stephen (emphatically not “Steve,” as he will inform you if necessary) would be appalled at my approach to a decision that to him would be based on a rigid calculus of economic means and electromechanical robustness.

But I liked the car. In much the same way that auto enthusiasts will disassemble and chrome-plate every bit of metal that was not covered in paint, my Pontiac had been lovingly detailed with rust, giving its undercarriage, tail pipe, and wheels a homey, terra cotta look. It had bright orange fake fur on the rear bench seat, with little encrusted patches that don’t bear much thinking about. The dashboard had a worn, die-cast figurine of Jesus attached to it with one of the bilaterally adhesive rectangles of blue foam-stuff that they sell for apartment-dwellers to mount artwork on walls. Around the completely inert but kind of cool radio were stickers for AC/DC and Throbbing Gristle, as well as one with a magnificent image of Twinkie the Kid, twirling his mighty lariat. I actually met Twinkie the Kid once, at a rally in support of bike-trail development in Los Angeles, but that’s a story best left for another time.

I was driving this magnificent chariot, which had whispered its name (Gilgamesh) to me the first night I drove it, to Ann Arbor to see my college friend Terry, who was doing grad work in Sociology at the University of Michigan. I took the 70 west to the 75 north, since I had good reason to believe that the more direct route along the 80 was currently overrun by huge, scabrous rats whose claws could rip the roof right off even a sturdy car like Gilgamesh.

It was about eleven AM, on a sunny and somewhat muggy morning in May, that I passed the town of Kestlerville, home of the Kestlerville Nuclear Feed Materials Processing Plant, which was about the only part of Kestlerville one can see from the highway. I was weary and my eyes were tired, even though I had let Gilgamesh drive on autopilot all night as I slept, so it took me a moment to notice the green mist. It lay along the ground for several hundred yards like fog on a football field, except that it was daylight and the fog was bright green and strangely iridescent.

to be continued…