Oh, God! Read online

  “But plenty people haven’t heard.”

  I thought to myself, you’re pretty hard to please. Maybe you should go on television. He knew what I was thinking.

  “Of course, I could make appearances myself, but we’d only have people dropping dead from hysterics. No, you’re my fella for better or worse and it’s not bad, but it could be better.”

  “I’ll try my best.”

  “That’s all I ask.”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  “Sir? What am I, a British knight? You can just call me God.”

  “Yes, God.” Yes, God?

  “So listen. Goodbye for now. It’s been good seeing you.”

  How do you reply? It’s been incredible seeing you? I was speechless. He waved goodbye and waited for me to leave. I went up the stairs, turned to look back, but He was gone.

  Judy was stirring from her nap.

  “Did I hear you talking to someone?”

  “God.”

  “Here?”

  “In the basement.”

  “You say His voice was in the basement?”

  “Not just His voice. Him.”

  “You’re saying you saw Him?”

  “I saw God.”

  “Downstairs?”

  “By the hot-water heater.”

  She started for the basement stairs.

  “What did He look like?”

  “Like somebody’s Jewish uncle.”

  Judy went down the steps with me following.

  “Well, He doesn’t seem to be here now, does He?”

  “Nope.”

  “What’s that smell—perfume?”

  “Cologne.”

  “Cologne?” she said, sniffing me.

  “No, it’s not from me. It’s God’s. You see, He was wearing Canoe.”

  9

  HOW IS IT IF God was only creating the illusion of appearance for me, that Judy was able to smell the cologne also? A little mystery plot here. And why, the detective asks, should I have smelled anything at all? I did mention this later on and it seemed so insignificant to Him, all He bothered to say was:

  “Don’t hock me with that. It happens to have a strong scent.”

  I bring this up only to illustrate that if I had questions, imagine what other people were going through. Theologians, for example. I don’t mean the power-minded ones who were busy calling me names. I mean responsible, sensitive theologians, sincerely concerned with Man’s relationship to God.

  There was a group of such scholars who came together from time to time at Georgetown University to discuss contemporary matters in theology, and nothing could be more important to them than the possibility of somebody having conversations with God. They called a special meeting of their group, which consisted of a Jesuit professor from Georgetown, an expert in eastern religions from Columbia, and professors from Yeshiva University, Brigham Young, Southern Methodist University and Princeton, all PhDs and a very prestigious assemblage.

  I was invited to appear before them. I thought, considering their credentials, that just meeting them would be valuable publicity, so I arranged to fly down to Washington—and at their expense. A car and driver met me at the airport and took me to my suite at The Georgetown Inn. I must say the celebrityness of it felt pretty good. I went on to the University for the first meeting, which was held around a long table in an impressive library.

  They were very direct. What they wanted to do was establish for themselves an accurate picture of what I claimed to have happened. They were going to ask me a great many questions, some that might seem to me tangential, but which they felt would have a bearing on the credibility of my story. So they asked me about the interview, but they also got into areas I was unprepared for, questions about my background and things that never come up in ordinary conversation—like moral questions, philosophical questions, Bar Mitzvah-type questions :

  “Did you feel close to God at your Bar Mitzvah?”

  “Do you remember your Haftorah?”

  “Can you sing it?” I couldn’t.

  “What does it mean?” I didn’t know what it meant then.

  “What is your personal philosophy?” How do you answer a question like that? I never even thought about it—my personal philosophy.

  “I don’t know. Do unto others …” Do unto others! In a room full of PhDs I was revealing a third-grade sensibility.

  “What does God mean to you?” Inasmuch as the last time I saw Him, He made me feel guilty what with all his complaints about readership and listenership, I said:

  “God is guilt.”

  “God is guilt!” There was a lot of exchanging of glances around the room, so I must have said something very profound or very stupid and to this day I still don’t know which.

  “In your mind’s eye, how do you imagine God to look?”

  “In my eye’s eye I can tell you He’s nearly bald, He has stooped shoulders, about five foot six, He has a Jewish nose and He overdresses.

  “That is a remarkable image.”

  “Well, that’s how He looks.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because I saw Him.”

  “You saw Him?”

  I then revealed that I had actually seen God. This was something I hadn’t told anybody yet. I knew my meeting with these gentlemen was coming up and I thought it might be better to let it come out in my discussions with them, rather than through another flashy press conference. It was a good decision, because that night when they issued a report on our initial progress, it included my statement that I had seen Him. So the press got the story anyway and in a much more credible setting. I was turning into a real media manipulator.

  My new disclosure sent our discussion into a turmoil. As it was put by one of the professors, a rather stuffy organizational type from Princeton, “What we have claimed here is a higher profile miracle.”

  They asked for time to discuss this new development and could I return the following day for further questioning. On my way back to the hotel, a remembrance from my childhood came to me, how in the Bronx where I grew up, a child claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary in a vacant lot and the lot was made into a local religious shrine and wouldn’t it look ridiculous to make a religious shrine out of my hot-water heater?

  I telephoned Judy, recounted the day’s events, ordered a roast beef dinner, and then this deep metaphysical thinker watched a Jerry Lewis movie on television and went to sleep.

  The next day, the scholars were gunning for me. They had asked an eminent “psycho-theologist,” as they called him, to join their ranks, but it was apparent he was a shrink run in to check me out. I was getting my looney test after all. It’s not enough to have your childhood God-notions examined, you have to endure some doctor observing what you do with your hands while talking. But it wouldn’t look good, making a fuss over his being there, so I smiled wanly at Doctor Shrink, we’ll call him, and we proceeded.

  I was in there for five hours and I’m not going into all the rambling discourse that went on in that room—most of it had me restate things I had already said. But taken at random, some of the points covered in their search were: God Is My Co-Pilot, a World War II movie with Dennis Morgan; The Song of Bernadette with Jennifer Jones; God Bless the Child, the original Billie Holiday recording and the latter version by Blood, Sweat and Tears. There’s nothing as self-indulgent as academicians in the open field. The details of my marriage. Reformed ceremony in a rabbi’s study, followed by a brunch for the immediate family in The Rainbow Room. Somebody actually asked what we ate. Doctor Shrink went into the area of fantasy and dreams and did I ever “see” other people the way I claimed to have seen God and I told him that I could distinguish between daydreams, night dreams, wet dreams and no dreams and that God actually sat in front of me, which was no dream. But he pressed on, making the point that a fantasy picture in the mind can have reality responses such as the mechanism that takes place in masturbation—and had I ever masturbated?—which got us into some of my adoles
cent masturbation fantasies over Jennifer Jones.

  “Is that the same Jennifer Jones who played in The Song of Bernadette?” he asked.

  “The same.”

  “A motion picture with a strong religious motif, is that not true?”

  “Yes, but how is that relevant?”

  “Only that we may have here the early beginnings of a distortion on your part of religious fantasy and sexual fantasy.”

  Now if this were true, it might have discredited me in the eyes of these esteemed scholars, a couple of whom were already blushing. But he wasn’t going to pin any bum sex rap on me.

  “It’s an interesting theory, Doctor, but it won’t work.”

  “How so?”

  “I was doing it over Jennifer Jones as she appeared in Ruby Gentry—not The Song of Bernadette.

  We drifted on. I don’t know what kind of image I was projecting. It certainly wasn’t that of a biblical expert.

  “What is your favorite part of the Bible?”

  “Ecclesiastes.”

  “Can you recite something?”

  “To every thing, there is a season …” Except I didn’t really know it and slipped into the lyrics of the Pete Seeger folk song adaptation and there were some embarrassed coughs for me, so I changed the subject by asking them if they wanted to hear “Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego” instead, and they didn’t, and I didn’t know it anyway.

  I arrived on the third and final day of our meetings dreading another round of questioning. They informed me that they had already come to some definite conclusions based on our conversations. Their consensus was that I was a person with little or no philosophic or theological knowledge, that I had demonstrated over the years an astonishing lack of interest in spiritual matters, that God apparently held a place of marginal importance in my life—if that, and in general, they deemed me to be about the least qualified person in the world they could imagine speaking with God.

  However, and it was a crucial qualifying however, the descriptions of my experience were so specific, so detailed, they found it difficult to conceive how I could have imagined it all, in the face of my obvious lack of interest in the subject.

  What it came down to was—they didn’t know. What I really think is they just didn’t want to believe that un-scholarly me could have spoken to God Himself, while they, who had spent their lifetimes in pursuit of God’s Truth, had to get it secondhand from such a moron.

  Or maybe I’m not being fair. Maybe in the true scholarly tradition they just didn’t feel they had enough documentation. And that was to be their statement. “We have not found sufficient documentation to support these claims.” Clever wording. It doesn’t say it didn’t happen, just that there was no documentation.

  Then they made a proposal based on what they said was a sense of fairness. They would wait until the following morning before issuing this statement, pending the arrival of certain evidence.

  “What evidence?” I was speaking to the nominal chairman, the stuffy type from Princeton.

  “We have prepared a set of questions for you to ask God.”

  “Oh, really? That’s just terrific. Are they short answer or essay?”

  “There are fifty questions.”

  “Fifty questions! You want me to get God to answer your fifty questions?”

  “Included are many which have real historical and philosophical value to Mankind, so we would be compensating for the shallowness of your previous interviews.”

  “I notice you didn’t say alleged interviews.”

  “Until tomorrow morning we are operating on the assumption your story is true.”

  “Thanks.”

  “We’ll know soon enough if you’re fabricating. Unless you are concealing an abundant knowledge, which we doubt, there are questions here you could not possibly answer by remaining in your hotel room until tomorrow. That will be our control factor.”

  “Lovely. And I just go back there and get God to perform His number—and then I show up with the answers in the morning.”

  “It might be difficult for you. It couldn’t be difficult for Him.”

  “How do I reach Him? Call Room Service?”

  Then they handed over their questions in a manila envelope and the court of inquiry was over. As I made my way out of the building, Doctor Shrink ran up to me.

  “I just wanted to say I had to be here in a professional capacity. But as a private opinion, let me offer that—if this is not true, sir, I think you are in need of help.”

  “No kidding?”

  I went back to the hotel and called New York.

  “Yes, Judy, fifty questions.”

  “What will you do?”

  “I’d like to do a Moses.” But how could I summon God? He summons you.

  “Forget it,” she said. “You went down there because it might help, and if it doesn’t, so what? Let them make their statement.”

  “It could be gorgeous, though—”

  “What?”

  “If I went back there tomorrow with His answers.”

  “Honey, come home.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  I said goodbye to Judy, then I lay back on my bed in my room at The Georgetown Inn, and with the chutzpa of all time, I tried to summon God.

  “Hello, God?”

  Hello, God—out loud like that. It sounded pretty foolish, especially when there was a knock on the door and I realized somebody was out there and overheard me.

  “Room Service.”

  I opened the door and there He was, God, wearing a bellhop’s uniform and pushing a tray of tea and cookies.

  “Hello, cutie,” He said.

  I was dumbfounded.

  “So let me in.” He came into the room and I closed the door behind Him.

  “Someday this will go down in history,” He said, “as the Miracle of the Tea and Cookies.”

  “You came! I summoned God!”

  “So I came. Don’t make a big deal. Here, oatmeal cookies, your favorite.”

  Do you think He baked them Himself?

  “They gave you some grilling, those fellas.”

  “That’s their job. God is their profession.”

  “So why are you fooling around with them? TV, I keep telling you. That’s got the impact.”

  “I decided you have to touch all the bases.”

  “By me, you’re stranded at second base.”

  “But you came. Does that mean you’ll help?”

  “Why I came is to tell you, enough of this. Every night I watch Johnny Carson and no you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry. Just do it. And don’t get so guilty. God is guilt! Such a thing. So let me see those questions.”

  He sat back in the chair to look them over, removing his little red-and-black bellhop’s cap to be comfortable, and I don’t know how people are going to feel about this, particularly if it’s their belief that God is ultimate and perfect, but He took out a pair of bifocals to help Him read better.

  “Oy-oy-oy! Such a tsimmes.”

  I looked over His shoulder.

  “What is that?”

  “What that is—is so you shouldn’t make up a story. A control factor, they said. I’ll say. It is fifty questions all right and it is written in Aramaic. And I know you don’t know Aramaic, because you didn’t even do so hot with Hebrew.”

  “Those bastards. Excuse me.”

  “It’s okay. They pulled on you a peppy trick. You send a fella to college, he has to show off.”

  I looked at the paper. It was absolutely impenetrable. God was reading, moving His lips while He read.

  “To tell you the truth, my Aramaic is a little rusty. Such questions. Look at this. ‘What is the true origin of the Universe?’ ‘What is the source of the planet Earth?’ “Establish the date of the Creation.’ What is this, a history final?”

  He thought a moment then He said, “I don’t know. You really want this?”

  “If it’s not too much trouble.
”

  “From this, you’d really impress them. Impress them? They’d plotz.” He thumbed through the questions again. “Well, so long as I’m here, we can give a fast run-through. But listen, use a typewriter. Your handwriting is terrible.”

  And that is what we did. God dictated the questions and the answers, and here is part of it:

  “ ‘Did Man fall from Grace with Adam?’ You talk about Adam, I’ll tell you something that never came out. I made not such a smart decision there. I made Adam seventeen and Eve sixteen. A couple of teenagers running around naked in the woods. Hippies! Anything could have happened.

  “ ‘Which of the world’s religions is closest to the Divine Truth?’ I should get into preferences? All of them are cute.

  “ ‘Is Jesus Christ the son of God?’ Jesus was a nice fella.” I think He really wanted to leave it at that, but possibly the look of indecision on my face led Him to go on. “Well, the thing is, people who want to believe that Jesus was my son can go ahead and believe it. It’s what they want to think and I don’t get into that. I mean, I created the Universe, I didn’t create Religion. Jesus was my son. Buddha was my son. Confucius. Mohammed. Moses. All the fellas. All God’s chillun are my chillun, if you know what I mean.

  “ ‘What is the true meaning of Man’s existence?’ This is like Philosophy 101. Life is a fountain! No, on this I have to say Man’s existence means what you think it means and what I think doesn’t count. How’s that for a deepy?

  “ ‘What is your position on abortion?’ A committee asks questions, this is what you get. And this is just what I’m talking about, on looking to God. You can’t work this out for yourselves? My position on abortion! This is like Meet the Press.

  “ ‘Will there be a Judgment Day for Man—if so, when?’ What do they want, a date to mark down on a calendar? First of all, I don’t do judgments. I just don’t get into that. And if they mean a Doomsday, end-of-the-world thing, I’m certainly not going to get into that. That’s for you to decide, but if you want my personal opinion, I wouldn’t look forward to it because there would be a lot of yelling and screaming and who needs that? Also I wouldn’t be doing anything like sitting up on a big throne saying who goes to Heaven and who goes to Hell because it would look silly, people going past me like a Radio City production number.