The Deal

Down the darkened street of the decaying suburb, streetsigns dusky, elephantine buildings bleeding slow light, Rainbow Grocery, Bingo, Paratransit, and the State Assistance complex, a hive of chalky buildings. Giant city blocks it takes forever to drive across, nothing here is built for humans, only automobiles, with empty-looking suburban homes hiding on anonymous corners. You know you've entered a 3rd world country now. You don't have to leave your American city to go there, you just get off the freeway, and find yourself huddled behind the wheel of your car, terrified to get out and step onto the haunted pavement where postindustrial waste blows in a toxic wind, afraid of getting lost here, where skeletal blacks dressed in ragged clothes look at you with hunted eyes, driven by demons of narcotics or hunger or want for dignity or meaning, where demented Vietnam vet amputees with pissed-in clothes roll their wheelchairs down stinking sidewalks, white rejects abandoned by the 4th of July.
There are well-dressed men and women who walk down these streets with Bibles held in their hands. There here for a reason- to tell you about the Deal. God's deal. The pitch: sales is an art with defined parameters. First you must establish need. You can't sell someone something they don't need, unless you first convince them they do. Here in the wastelands, its easy. Hunger for bread or for justice translates easily to hunger for God's Deal. Let me first tell you- this isn't the only life. Really? The weeds in the sidewalk don't talk. They wave from side to side whichever way the wind blows. The smell of grease and of gravel? My home, my playground. What other life is there? The Kingdom of God. Gods world is green, eternal, painless, pure. The Paradise of Eden. God's Deal? Its not the deal of Man. Man offers you possessions, God offers you eternal life. He reaches into his bookbag and pulls out a religious text, hands it to the man. The man frowns, looks it over, pushes it back. The other man says take it, its free. The man takes it back, opens it, looks at the pictures of happy people in the world of God. Let me tell you more about God's Deal. Would you like to live forever? Not here I wouldn't. Not like this. Well theres another way. There's a way to walk with Christ. Like the man doesn't know that. He's resisting, he waves his arm, look at all these Churches. That's the only other thing out here other than Rainbow Grocery, Bingo, Paratransit, and the State Assistance complex, fortress of right angles and shame. Giant city blocks it takes forever to drive across, this is what's left of the West. There's Churches every-fuckin-where. FOLSOM WORSHIP CENTER, one sign says on a colossal rectangle of unadorned white, a cross standing erect up above it. COME WORSHIP HERE the signs say. WORSHIP GOD WITH US the signs say. The man with the Deal takes a step back. But did you make it yours? he asks. Did you make it yours? Did you really try to let God enter you and did you really feel him in your life? Did you really shake hands with God, accept his Deal, kneel down, and Worship him? Did you give up your Self?
No, the other man says. No he didn't. He moves back then into the smell of grease and of gravel. He goes whichever way the wind blows as natural and free as you can manage in this cellar of the world. Don't try to sell me a pie in the sky. I can't see it. I can't see this God. The man selling God's Deal says "can you see the wind"? and he says "no but I can see what it moves, and I can't see God movin' shit" and the two men part ways.
Get off these streets fucker, get off these streets before you become the fear you hate, or is it... become the hate you fear? Get back to your Deal, your Church, your Job, your Car, your steel shield against the World. Get back in your car, and stay there. He watches the strange man from some other part of the city going from door to door with his combed hair, sparkling shoes, oiled leather bookcase.
Who put you in charge of the Deal anyway?