He said, "Think of those young people out in the world struggling with outdated religions or with no religions, think of those people as your target market."

People are looking for how to put everything together. They need a unified field theory that combines glamour and holiness, fashion and spirituality. People need to reconcile being good and being good- looking.

After day after day of no solid food, limited sleep, climbing thousands of stairs, and the agent yelling his ideas to me over and over, this all made perfect sense.

The music team was busy writing hymns even before I was under contract. The writing team was putting my autobiography to bed. The media team was doing press releases, merchandise licensing agreements, the skating shows: The Creedish Death Tragedy on Ice, the satellite hookups, tanning appointments. The image team has creative control on appearance. The writing team has control of every word that comes out of my mouth.

To cover the acne I got from cycling Laurabolin, I started wearing makeup. To cure the acne, someone on the support team got me a prescription for Retin-A.

For the hair loss, the support team was spritzing me with Rogaine.

Everything we did to fix me had side effects we had to fix.Then the fixes had side effects to fix and so on and so on.

Imagine a Cinderella story where the hero looks in the mirror and who's looking back is a total stranger. Every word he says is written for him by a team of professionals. Everything he wears is chosen or designed by a team of designers.

Every minute of every day is planned by his publicist.

Maybe now you're starting to get a picture.

Plus your hero is spiking drugs you can only buy in Sweden or Mexico so he can't see down past his own jutting-out chest. He's tanned and shaved and wigged and scheduled because people in Tucson, people in Seattle, or Chicago or Baton Rouge, don't want an avatar with a hairy back.

It's around floor number two hundred that you reach the highest state.

You're gone anaerobic, you're burning muscle instead of fat, but your mind is crystal-clear.

The truth is that all this was just part of the suicide process. Because tanning and steroids are only a problem if you plan to live a long time.

Because the only difference between a suicide and a martyrdom really is the amount of press coverage.

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, doesn't it just lie there and rot?

And if Christ had died from a barbiturate overdose, alone on the bathroom floor, would He be in Heaven?

This wasn't a question of whether or not I was going to kill myself. This, this effort, this money and time, the writing team, the drugs, the diet, the agent, the flights of stairs going up to nowhere, all this was so I could off myself with everyone's full attention.

This one time, the agent asked me where I saw myself in five years.

Dead, I told him. I see myself dead and rotting. Or ashes, I can see myself burned to ashes.

I had a loaded gun in my pocket, I remember. Just the two of us were standing in the back of a crowded, dark auditorium. I remember it was the night of my first big public appearance.

I see myself dead and in Hell, I said.

I remember I was planning to kill myself that night.

I told the agent, I figured I'd spend my first thousand years of Hell in some entry-level position, but after that I wanted to move into management. Be a real team player. Hell is going to see enormous growth in market share over the next millennium. I wanted to ride the crest.

The agent said that sounded pretty realistic.

We were smoking cigarettes, I remember. Down onstage, some local preacher was doing his opening act. Part of his warm-up was to get the audience hyperventilated. Loud singing does the job. Or chanting. According to the agent, when people shout this way or sing "Amazing Grace" at the top of their lungs, they breathe too much. People's blood should be acid. When they hyperventilate the carbon dioxide level of their blood drops, and their blood become alkaline.

"Respiratory alkalosis," he says.

People get light-headed. People fall down with their ears ringing, their fingers and toes go numb, they get chest pains, they sweat. This is supposed to be rapture. People thrash on the floor with their hands cramped into stiff claws.

This is what passes for ecstasy.

"People in the religion business call it 'lobstering,'" the agent says. "They call it speaking in tongues."

Repetitive motions add to the effect, and the opening act down onstage runs through the usual drills. The audience claps in unison. Long rows of people hold hands and sway together in their delirium. People do that rainbow hands.

Whoever invented this routine, the agent tells me, they pretty much run things in Hell.

I remember the corporate sponsor was SummerTime Old-Fashioned Instant Lemonade.

My cue is when the opening act calls me down onto the stage, my part of the show is putting a spell on everybody.

"A naturalistic trance state," the agent says.

The agent takes a brown bottle out of his blazer pocket. He says, "Take a couple Endorphinols if you feel any emotion coming on."

I tell him to give me a handful.

To get ready for tonight, staffers went and visited local people to give them free tickets to the show. The agent is telling me this for the hundredth time. The staffers ask to use the bathroom during their visit and jot down notes about anything they find in the medicine cabinet. According to the agent, the Reverend Jim Jones did this and it worked miracles for his People's Temple.

Miracles probably isn't the right word.

Up on the pulpit is a list of people I've never met and their life-threatening conditions.

Mrs. Steven Brandon, I just have to call out. Come down and have your failing kidneys touched by God.

Mr. William Doxy, come down and put your crippled heart in God's hands.

Part of my training was how to press my fingers into somebody's eyes hard and fast so the pressure registered on their optic nerve as a flash of white light.

"Divine light," the agent says.

Part of my training was how to press my hands over somebody's ears so hard they heard a buzzing noise I could tell them was the eternal Om.

"Go," the agent says.

I've missed my cue.

Down onstage, the opening preacher is shouting Tender Branson into a microphone. The one, the only, the last survivor, the great Tender Branson.

The agent tells me, "Wait." He plucks the cigarette out of my mouth and pushes me down the aisle. "Now, go," he says.

All the hands reach out into the aisle to touch me. The spotlight's so bright onstage in front of me. In the dark around me are the smiles of a thousand delirious people who think they love me. All I have to do is walk into the spotlight.

This is dying without the control issues.

The gun is heavy and banging my hip in my pants pocket.

This is having a family without being familiar. Having relations without being related.

Onstage, the spotlights are warm.

This is being loved without the risk of loving anyone in return.

I remember this was the perfect moment to die.

It wasn't Heaven, but it was as close as I was ever going to get.

I raised my arms and people cheered. I lowered my arms and people were silent. The script was there on the podium for me to read. The typewritten list told me who out in the dark was suffering from what.

Everybody's blood was alkaline. Everybody's heart was there for the taking. This is how it felt to shoplift. This is how it felt to hear confessions over my crisis hotline. This is how I imagined sex.

With Fertility on my mind, I started to read the script:

We are all the divine products of creation.

We are each of us the fragments that make up something whole and beautiful.

Each time I paused, people would hold their breath.

The gift of life, I read from the script, is precious.

I put my hand on the gun loaded with bullets in my pocket.

The precious gift of life must be preserved no matter now painful and pointless it seemed. Peace, I told them, is a gift so perfect that only God should grant it. I told people, only God's most selfish children would steal God's greatest gift, His only gift greater than life. The gift of death.

This lesson is to the murderer, I said. This is to the suicide. This is to the abortionist. This is to the suffering and sick.

Only God has the right to surprise His children with death.

I had no idea what I was saying until it was too late. And maybe it was a coincidence, or maybe the agent knew what I had in mind when I'd asked him to get me some bullets and a gun, but what happened is the script really screwed up my whole plan. There was no way I could read this and then kill myself. It would just look so stupid.

So I never did kill myself.

The rest of the evening went as planned. People went home feeling saved, and I told myself I'd kill myself some other time. The moment was all wrong. I procrastinated, and timing was everything.

Besides.

Eternity was going to seem like forever.

With the crowds of smiling people smiling at me in the dark, me who spent my life cleaning bathrooms and mowing the lawn, I told myself, why rush anything?

I'd backslid before, I'd backslide again. Practice makes perfect.

If you could call it that.

I figured, a few more sins would help round out my resume.

This is the upside of already being eternally damned.

I figured, Hell could wait.

Before this plane goes down, before the flight recorder tape runs out, one of the things I want to apologize for is the Book of Very Common Prayer.

People need to know the Book of Very Common Prayerwas not my idea. Yes, it sold two hundred million copies, worldwide. It did. Yes, I let them put my name on it, but the book was the agent's brainchild. Before that the book was the idea of some nobody on the writing team. Some copywriter trying to break into the big time, I forget.

What's important is the book was not my idea.

What happened is one day, the agent comes up to me with that dancing light in his brown eyes that means a deal. According to my publicist, I'm booked solid. This is after we did that line of Bibles I was autographing in bookstores. We had a million plus feet of guaranteed shelf space in bookstores, and I was on tour.

"Don't expect a book tour to be something fun," the agent tells me.

The thing about book signings, the agent says, is they're exactly the same as the last day of high school when everyone wants you to write in their high school annual, only a book tour can go on for the rest of your life.

According to my itinerary, I'm in a Denver warehouse signing stock when the agent pitches me on his idea for a weeny book of meditations people can use in their everyday lives. He sees this as a paperback of little prose poems. Fifty pages, tops. Little tributes to the environment, children, safe stuff. Mothers. Pandas. Topics that step on nobody's toes. Common problems. We put my name on the spine, say I wrote it, run the product up a flagpole.

What else people need to know is I never saw the finished book until after the second press run, after it had sold more than fifty thousand copies. Already people weren't not just a little pissed off, but all the fuss only upped sales.

What happened is one day I'm in the green room waiting to co-host some daytime television project. This is way fast forward, after the autographed Bible book tour. The idea here is if I co-host and enough people tune in, I'll spin off with a vehicle of my own. So I'm in the green room trading toenail secrets with somebody, the actress Wendi Daniels or somebody, and she asks me to sign her copy of the book. The Book of Very Common Prayer.This is the first time I ever see a copy, I swear. On a stack of my own autographed Bibles, I swear.

According to Wendi Daniels, I can smooth out the swelling under my eyes by rubbing in a dab of hemorrhoid cream.

Then she hands it to me, the Book of Very Common Prayer,and my name is just so right there on the spine. Me, me, me. There I am.

There inside are the prayers people think I wrote:

The Prayer to Delay Orgasm

The Prayer to Lose Weight

The feeling, the way it feels when laboratory product-testing animals are ground up to make hot dogs, that's how hurt I felt.

The Prayer to Stop Smoking

Our most Holy Father,

Take from me the choice You have given.

Assume control of my will and habits.

Wrest from me power over my own behavior.

May it be Your decision how I act.

May it be by Your hands, my every failing.

Then if I still smoke, may I accept that my smoking is

Your will.

Amen.

The Prayer to Remove Mildew Stains The Prayer to Prevent Hair Loss

God of ultimate stewardship,

Shepherd of thine flock,

As You would succor the least of Your charges,

As You would rescue the most lost of Your lambs,

Restore to me the full measure of my glory.

Preserve in me the remainder of my youth.

All of Creation is Yours to provide.

All of Creation is Yours to withhold.

God of limitless bounty,

Consider my suffering.

Amen.

The Prayer to Induce Erection

The Prayer to Maintain an Erection

The Prayer to Silence Barking Dogs

The Prayer to Silence Car Alarms

The way all this felt, I looked terrible on television. My spin-off television show, well, I had to kiss that goodbye. One minute after we were off the air, I was being all over the telephone long-distance to the agent in New York. Everything on my end of the conversation was furious.

All he cared about was the money.

"What's a prayer?" he says. "It's an incantation," he says, and he's yelling back at me over the phone. "It's a way for people to focus their energy around a specific need. People need to get clear on a single intention and accomplish it."

The Prayer to Prevent Parking Tickets

The Prayer to Stop Plumbing Leaks

"People pray to solve problems, and these are the honest-to-God problems that people worry about," the agent's still yelling at me.

The Prayer for Increased Vaginal Sensitivity

"A prayer is how the squeaky wheel gets greased," he says. That's how made out of cheese his heart is. "You pray to make your needs known."

The Prayer Against Drivetrain Noise

The Prayer for a Parking Space

Oh, divine and merciful God,

History is without equal for how much I will adore

You, when You give me today, a place to park.

For You are the provider.

And You are the source.

From You all good is delivered.

Within You all is found.

In Your care will I find respite. With Your

guidance, will I find peace.

To stop, to rest, to idle, to park.

These are Yours to give me. This is what I ask.

Amen.

Seeing how I'm just about to die here, people need to know that my personal intention all along has been to serve the glory of God. Pretty much. Not that you can find this in our mission statement, but that's my general overall plan. I want to at least make an effort. This new book just looked so not at all pious. So not even a little devout.