The Messiah of Morris Avenue - First Chapter

Chapter One

In the beginning . . . I knew him only as the Mysterious Stranger.

I first came across him at a low point in my career -- well, the low point, actually -- lower, as they say in Texas, than a snake's belly. Clinging to the underside of said reptile was where you'd find me, Johnny Greco, in the middle of the second decade of America's Millennium, or Christ's Millennium -- which by then were interchangeable terms.

I was entering if not the twilight, then certainly the happy hour, of a long career that had begun in youthful idealism at the Columbia School of Journalism and proceeded more realistically through the ranks of the newspaper of record, reaching its peak when I was forty-something and the descendants of Mr. Joseph Pulitzer bestowed one of their baubles on me for investigative reportage. This was when that still meant something: before they began awarding Pulitzers for In-Depth Gossip and Best Rumor.

From then on my path led downhill to its nadir: a senior post at something called the New Jersey Inquiring Mind.

According to its proprietors the Inquiring Mind was a newspaper, but it had no connection to news or to paper. At a time when most real newspapers had gone out of business, the term had the cachet of the obsolete. The Inquiring Mind was a newspaper in the same sense that, when I was a kid, a pimpmobile was called a brougham.

The home page was topped with tasteful line art depicting a crusader on whose shield was emblazoned the proud word TRUTH. Below this logo was a bottom-feeding web-zine, pumping out old-fashioned streaming video and chockablock with blinding ads for sex aids, bankruptcy lawyers, homeopathic cancer cures, intercontinental "dating" services, and astrology-based investment strategies.

There was an identical Inquiring Mind in every other state of the Union and in scores of nominally English-speaking countries. The whole world-wide web-net of rock-bottom sleaze cost almost nothing to run and made a fortune. It was owned by three guys in Bangalore. Alas, they didn't call themselves Three Guys from Bangalore. If only. They called themselves News Web and were listed on the Nikkei Multi-Bourse. One of them is now prime minister of India.

The Inquiring Mind was premised on an obvious if depressing reality. Whatever global computer literacy was doing for understanding among nations, it had added hundreds of millions of people to the happy throng of those willing to do anything in front of a camera. Now everyone in the world had the chance to act like a fubar senior on spring break. Whether it was a Sherpa trying to Rollerblade down Stage 2 of Everest or an ordinary Joe from Canton, Ohio, with size 14 feet so webbed that from the butt down he looked like Donald Duck, the freaks of Planet Earth found a warm welcome at the Inquiring Mind.

Like all the others, the New Jersey "edition" was essentially a strip-mining mechanism that scoured our territory for freaks. The only remotely newspaperlike aspect was my half-dozen stringers around the Garden State, doing the scouring. If they found something promising, they forwarded their video to me; if I liked it I would "report" it: that is, insert myself in the video (thanks to some miracle of digital editing beyond my print-bred brain) and slug it into the appropriate department. It could run regionally or nationally, or -- that pinnacle of journalistic prowess -- globally.

The top-rated department was the Nut Log, which brought our reportorial scrutiny to bear upon rampant cases of mental derangement. (It wasn't exploitative or anything -- perish the thought.)

Many Nut Log candidates were religious nuts, which wasn't surprising, given the improvements Christian fundamentalists had introduced into the American way of life. The Ten Commandments now appeared helpfully in schools, bars, planes, restrooms, gyms, and nightclubs; on cigarettes, alcohol, prescription drugs, lingerie advertising -- anywhere temptation might slither up and bite your ankle. This theocratic concern for American souls was widely seen as a good thing. In a national Inquiring Mind Insta-Poll we'd run, 86 percent of the respondees believed theocracy was spelled "The Ocracy"; 89.9 percent of them said they didn't know what Ocracy was, but they knew it was good.

The most powerful effect of the Ocracy on the deranged was its constant drumbeat that these were the Final Days. For someone with a limited supply of marbles, the urgency of the end-time message had a very specific result. Instead of developing some more normal abnormality like barking from trees or directing traffic in their boxers, they zeroed in on being God -- or close to it.