The Prayer Against Excessive Underarm Wetness

The Prayer for a Second Interview

The Prayer to Locate a Lost Contact Lens

Still, even Fertility says I'm way off base about the book. Fertility wanted a second volume.

It's Fertility who says, some stadiums when I'm up front praising God, I'm the same as people wearing clothes printed with Mickey Mouse or Coca-Cola. I mean, it's so easy. It's not even a real choice. You can't go wrong. Fertility says, praising God is just such a safe thing to do. You don't even have to give it any thought.

"Be fruitful and multiply," Fertility says to me. "Praise God. There's no real risk. This is just our default setting."

What saved the Book of Very Common Prayerwas, people were using every prayer. Some people were pissed off, mostly religious people who resented the competition, but by this point our cash now was down. Our total revenues were leveling off. It was market saturation. People had the prayers committed to memory. People were stuck in traffic reciting the Prayer to Make Traffic Move.Men were reciting the Prayer to Delay Orgasm,and it worked at least as well as multiplication tables. My best option seemed to be to just keep my mouth shut and smile.

Besides, the attendance figures were down at my personal appearances, this looked to be the beginning of the end. My Peoplemagazine cover was already three months behind me.

And there's no such thing as Celebrity Outplacement.

You don't see faded movie stars or whoever going back to community college for retraining. The only field left to me was doing the game show circuit, and I'm not that smart.

I'd peaked, and timing-wise, this looked like another good window to do my suicide, and I almost did. The pills were in my hand. That's how close I came. I was planning to overdose on meta-testos- terone.

Then the agent calls on the telephone, loud, real loud, the way it sounds when a million screaming Christians are screaming your name in Kansas City, that's the kind of excitement that's in his voice.

Over the phone in my hotel room the agent tells me about the best booking of my career. It's next week. It's a thirty-second slot between a tennis shoe commercial and a national taco restaurant spot, prime time during sweeps week.

It amazes me to think those pills were almost in my mouth.

This is just so not boring anymore.

Network television, a million billion people watching, this would be the prime moment, my last chance to pull a gun and shoot myself with a decent audience share.

This would be such a totally not-ignored martyrdom.

"One catch," the agent tells me over the phone. He's shouting, "The catch is I told them you'd do a miracle."

A miracle.

"Nothing too big. You don't have to part the Red Sea or anything," he says. "Turning water into wine would be enough, but remember, no miracle and they won't run the spot."

Enter Fertility Hollis back into my life in Spokane, Washington, where I'm eating pie and coffee, incognito in a Shari's restaurant, when she comes in the front door and heads straight for my table. You can't call Fertility Hollis anybody's fairy godmother, but you might be surprised where she turns up.

But most times you wouldn't.

Fertility with her old-colored gray eyes as bored as the ocean.

Fertility with her every exhale an exhausted sigh.

She's the blase eye of the hurricane that's the world around her.

Fertility with her arms and face hanging slack as some jaded survivor, some immortal, an Egyptian vampire after watching the million years of television repeats we call history, she slumps into the seat across from me being glad since I needed her for a miracle anyway.

This is back when I could still give my entourage the slip. I wasn't a nobody yet, but I was on the cusp. Thanks to my media slump. My publicity doldrums.

The way Fertility slouches with her elbows on the table and her face propped in her hands, her bored- colored red hair hanging limp in her face, you'd guess she's just arrived from some planet with not as much gravity as Earth. As if just being here, as skinny as she is she weighs eight hundred pounds.

How she's dressed is just separates, slacks and a top, shoes, dragging a canvas tote bag. The air- conditioning is working, and you can smell her fabric softener, sweet and fake.

How she looks is watered-down.

How she looks is disappearing.

How she looks is erased.

"Don't stress," she says. "This is just me not wearing any makeup. I'm here on an assignment."

Her job.

"Right," she says. "My evil job."

I ask, How's my fish?

She says, "Fine."

No way could meeting her here be a coincidence. She has to be following me.

"What you forget is I know everything," Fertility says. She asks, "What time is it?"

I tell her, One fifty-three in the afternoon.

"In eleven minutes the waitress will bring you another piece of pie. Lemon meringue, this time. Later, only about sixty people will show up for your appearance tonight. Then, tomorrow morning, something called the Walker River Bridge will collapse in Shreveport. Wherever that is."

I say she's guessing.

"And," she says and smirks, "you need a miracle. You need a miracle, bad."

Maybe I do, I say. These days, who doesn't need a miracle? How does she know so much?

"The same way I know," she says and nods toward the other side of the dining room, "that waitress over there has cancer. I know the pie you're eating will upset your stomach. Some movie theater in China will burn in a couple minutes, give or take what time it is in Asia. Right now in Finland, a skier is triggering an avalanche that will bury a dozen people."

Fertility waves and the waitress with cancer is coming over.

Fertility leans across the table and says, "I know all this because I know everything."

The waitress is young and with hair and teeth and everything, meaning nothing about her looks wrong or sick, and Fertility orders a chicken stir-fry with vegetables and sesame seeds. She asks, does it come with rice?

Spokane is still outside the windows. The buildings. The Spokane River. The sun we all have to share. A parking lot. Cigarette butts.

I ask, so why didn't she warn the waitress?

"How would you react if a stranger told you that kind of news? It would just wreck her day," Fertility says. "And all her personal drama would just hold up my order."

It's cherry pie I'm eating that's going to upset my stomach. The power of suggestion.

"All you have to do is pay attention to the patterns," Fertility says. "After you see all the patterns, you can extrapolate the future."

According to Fertility Hollis, there is no chaos.

There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.

If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.

What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. What we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.

There is no free will.

There are no variables.

"There is only the inevitable," Fertility says. "There's only one future. You don't have a choice."

The bad news is we don't have any control.

The good news is you can't make any mistakes.

The waitress across the dining room looks young and pretty and doomed.

"I pay attention to the patterns," Fertility says.

She says she can't not pay attention.

"They're in my dreams more and more every night," she says. "Everything. It's the same as reading a history book about the future, every night."

So she knows everything.

"So I know you need a miracle to go on television with."

What I need is a good prediction.

"That's why I'm here," she says and takes a fat daily planner book out of her tote bag. "Give me a time window. Give me a date for your prediction."

I tell her, Any time during the week after next.

"How about a multiple-car accident," she says, reading from her book.

I ask, How many cars?

"Sixteen cars," she says. "Ten dead. Eight injured."

Does she have anything flashier?

"How about a casino fire in Las Vegas," she says. "Topless showgirls in big feather headdresses on fire, stuff like that."

Any dead?

"No. Minor injuries. A lot of smoke damage, though." .

Something bigger.

"A tanning salon explosion."

Something dazzling.

"Rabies in a national park."

Boring.

"Subway collision."

She's putting me to sleep.

"A fur activist strapped with bombs in Paris."

Skip it.

"Oil tanker capsizes."

Who cares about that stuff?

"Movie star miscarries."

Great, I say. My public will think I'm a real monster when that comes true.

Fertility pages around in her daily planner.

"Geez, it's summer," she says. "We don't have a lot of choices in disasters."

I tell her to keep looking.

"Next week, Ho Ho the giant panda the National Zoo is trying to breed will pick up a venereal disease from a visiting panda."

No way am I going to say that on television.

"How about a tuberculosis outbreak?"

Yawn.

"Freeway sniper?"

Yawn.

"Shark attack?"

She must really be scraping the bottom of the barrel.

"A broken racehorse leg?"

"A slashed painting in the Louvre?"

"A ruptured prime minister?"

"A fallen meteorite?"

"Infected frozen turkeys?"

"A forest fire?"

No, I tell her.

Too sad.

Too artsy.

Too political.

Too esoteric.

Too gross.

No appeal.

"A lava flow?" Fertility asks.

Too slow. No real drama. Mostly just property damage.

The problem is disaster movies have everybody expecting too much from nature.

The waitress brings the chicken stir-fry and my lemon meringue pie and fills our coffee cups. Then she smiles and goes off to die.

Fertility pages back and forth in her book.

In my guts, the cherry pie is putting up a fight. Spokane is outside. The air conditioning is inside. Nothing even looks like a pattern.

Fertility Hollis says, "How about killer bees?" I ask, Where? "Arriving in Dallas, Texas." When?

"Next Sunday morning, at ten past eight." A few? A swarm? How many? "Zillions." I tell her, Perfect.

Fertility lets out a sigh and digs into her chicken stir-fry. "Shit," she says, "That's the one I knew you'd pick all along."

So a zillion killer bees buzz into Dallas, Texas, at ten past eight on Sunday morning, right on schedule. This is despite the fact I only had a crummy fifteen percent market share of the television audience for my spot.

The next week, the network slots me for a full minute, and some heavy hitters, the drug companies, the car makers, the oil and tobacco conglomerates, are lining up as definite maybe sponsors if I can come up with an even bigger miracle.

For all the wrong reasons, the insurance companies are very interested.

Between now and next week, I'm on the road making weeknight appearances in Florida. It's the Jacksonville-Tampa-Orlando-Miami circuit. It's the Tender Branson Miracle Crusade. One night each.

My Miracle Minute, that's what the agent and the network want to call it, well it takes about zero effort to produce. Someone points a camera at you with your hair combed and a tie around your neck, and you look somber and talk straight into the lens:

The Ipswich Point Lighthouse will topple tomorrow.

Next week, the Mannington Glacier in Alaska will collapse and capsize a cruise ship that's sightseeing too close.

The week after that, mice carrying a deadly virus will turn up in Chicago, Tacoma, and Green Bay.

This is exactly the same as being a television newscaster, only before the fact.

The way I see the process happening is I'll get Fertility to give me a couple dozen predictions at a time, and I'll just tape a season's worth of Miracle Minutes. With a year in the can, I'll be free to make personal appearances, endorse products, sign books. Maybe do some consulting. Do cameo walk-ons in movies and television.

Don't ask me when because I don't remember, but somewhere along the way I keep forgetting to commit suicide.

If the publicist ever put killing myself on my schedule I'd be dead. Seven p.m., Thursday, drink drain cleaner. No problem. But what with the killer bees and the demands on my time, I keep stressing about what if I can't find Fertility again. This, and my entourage is with me every step of the way. The team's always dogging me, the publicist, the schedulers, the personal fitness trainer, the orthodontist, the dermatologist, the dietician.

The killer bees got less accomplished than you'd expect. They didn't kill anybody, but they got a lot of attention. Now I needed an encore.

A collapsing stadium. A mining cave-in.

A train derailment.

The only moment I'm ever alone is when I go sit on the toilet, and even then I'm surrounded.

Fertility is nowhere.

In almost every public men's room, there's a hole chipped in the wall between one toilet stall and the next. This is chipped through solid wood an inch thick by somebody with just their fingernails. This is done over days or months at a time. You see these holes scratched through marble, through steel. As if someone in prison is trying to escape. The hole is only big enough to look though, or talk. Or put a finger through or a tongue or a penis, and escape just that little bit at a time.

What people call these openings is "glory holes."

It's the same as where you'd find a vein of gold.

Where you'd find glory.

I'm on a toilet in the Miami airport, and right at my elbow there's the hole in the stall wall, and all around the hole are messages left by men who sat here before me.

John M was here 3/14/64.

Carl B was here Jan. 8, 1976.

Epitaphs.

Some of them are scratched here fresh. Some are covered up but scratched so deep they're still readable under decades of paint.

Here are the shadows left behind by a thousand moments, a thousand moods, of needs traced here on the wall by men who are gone. Here is the record of their being here. Their visit. Their passing. Here's what the caseworker would call a primary source document.

A history of the unacceptable.

Be here tonight for a free blow job. Saturday, June 18, 1973.

All this is scratched in the wall.

Here are words without pictures. Sex without names. Pictures without words. Scratched here is a naked woman with her long legs spread wide, her round staring breasts, her long flowing hair and no face.

Squirting huge teardrops toward her hairy vagina is a severed penis as big as a man.

Heaven, the words say, is an all-you-can-eat pussy buffet.

Heaven is getting fucked up the ass.

Go to Hell faggot.

Been there.

Go suck shit.

Done that.

These are only a few of the voices around me when a real voice, a woman's voice, whispers, "You need another disaster, don't you?"